Wordpress and Blogger etc Links

[Healeyman]

I am in a middle of a blogger outreach project  and had  many blogs respond  that are   wordpress and blogger  etc  hosted ( sub-domain )  type blogs  like

http://xxxxxx.blogspot.com/

Is  there any value in my website getting a link on these blogs and  how do evaluate there value to me  in SEO metrics.

Cheers

Paul;

[ShaMenz]

Hi Healeyman,

Tom has pretty much nailed the answer above.

Just one thing to add. If the blogs in question meet all of the criteria Tom has mentioned in his first paragraph and are likely to bring you referral traffic, perfect. If you are just thinking about the possibility that they might influence search engine rankings, your time would probably be better spent looking for opportunities that have a potential to bring people to your site.

Sha

[ecommercebc]

Hi Paul,

If you'd like to use OSE to understand the PA/DA of these blogs and see who is linking to them, then you can definitely do this.

Obviously, if you tried something like https://androiddevel.wordpress.com in OSE, you'd see a 100 domain authority, as the Wordpress.com domain is incredibly authoritative. However, when you're looking at blogs hosted on wordpress.com (or blogger), you want to pay closer attention to the page authority. You can also use the 'Show all links from all pages on **this subdomain' **to exclude websites that are linking to wordpress.com but not the blog you're looking at.

[TomRayner]

Hi Paul

They certainly can be of value.  If the blog has some good link metrics, it looks active and engaging with its audience, it matches your subject matter and if you can produce something of worth to them, then the link will be worthwhile regardless of the subdomain/domain it sits on.

I think something you should consider however is how some SEOs use .wordpress.com, .blogspot.com and other web 2.0s for different link building purposes.  Some people set up blogs on the subdomains solely for links - and then attempt to power up the subdomains themselves by sending more links/spam to them.  The reason being is that these web 2.0s may inherit some strength for the root domains and therefore pass on a good amount of SEO benefit, or even make the subdomain rankable itself.

Of course, all of that would be considered to be unnatural and therefore may fall foul of Google penalties or filters.  The reason I bring that up is, while you're not looking to use those blogs in that manner, having a lot of the majority of your links coming from those kind of blogs may have a diminishing returns effect or could end up passing much less SEO "strength" in the future - as these subdomain links might be devalued.  If you look back to the first Penguin update when Google broadly penalised directories, article sites and specifically other existing web 2.0s, such as Squidoo links, links coming from the squidoo domain were widely devalued because of people creating accounts and lenses solely just to get a "strong link" from them.  Obviously you could see the similarity there between squidoo and wordpress/blogspot, so it's worth watching out for.

However, I think if the blog has some good link metrics, it looks active and engaging with its audience, it matches your subject matter and if you can produce something of worth to them, then the link will be worthwhile.  Like all things, earn those links in moderation.  I can't ever see those links being penalised if you follow the above criteria, but just be aware that having a disproportionate amount in your link profile may eventually have some form of diminishing returns.

Hope this helps.