All those SEO optimizers who leave comments at dofollow blogs to get quality backlinks may have already faced some problems with the “recent comments” widget. As you (should) already know, what this widget does is show excerpts from recent comments posted for a blog post on the homepage. There are many benefits for blog owners to have the latest comments on their blogs displayed on their homepage and if they include a “Recent Comments” section in their sidebar, visitors would be able to immediately read comments and hopefully be impressed enough to either return to the blog at some point in the future, or click on them to read the posts.

However, insofar as SEO optimization is concerned, this widget has both positive and negative aspects. Let me tell you about what happened to one of my websites this year because of this widget. Normally when I create a new website, I get a few links from social bookmarking or web 2.0 websites and add links to the new website from my other related websites. In most cases, it is enough to get the site indexed in search engines within a few days. If I start getting too many backlinks in a relatively short period of time, Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines may consider this as dubious and unnatural. This is the reason I try to obtain the most relevant and reputable backlinks first. Sometimes, if the new website has not been indexed within a week after getting backlinks from social bookmarking websites and my other websites, I start posting a couple of comments with links to my website per day.

A few weeks ago, I created a new website; we’ll just call it website X for the time being. As per normal, I bookmarked it, added it to web 2.0 websites and added a few links pointing to website X from my other websites. However, I was very surprised when it wasn’t indexed in Google after four days. I decided not to wait anymore to get more backlinks, so, I started posting comments on blogs relevant to my niche. Ten days passed and the website had still not been indexed. I decided to find out why and checked with Yahoo Explorer. Believe it or not, this is what I saw:

600 links in only ten days! As you have probably guessed, those reputable blogs that accepted my comments with links to my website had hundreds of indexed pages. Because of the “recent comment” widget that showed the latest comment on each blog page, my links where placed on every blog page. This was the reason why Google thought I was using black hat techniques while growing my initial links too fast and therefore decided not to index the site.

So what do I conclude? Well, if your website is new, try not to add comments to blogs that have a “recent comments” widget as it will do nothing but harm. However, if your blog has already been indexed and already has quite a few backlinks from other websites, you can do it without any worries. At the moment I am trying to delete my comments with backlinks to website X from these blogs. This plugin will add a list of the most recent comments posted to your blog and they are sorted in descending order with the newest at the top. That is why after posting a new comment it appears at the top of the list. What I do in this case is simply post 3-5 comments without any links and hope that blog owners accept them.

Up until now, website x is still not indexed. I will let you know when it has been indexed and how high it will rank.