When I read your comment I thought it was just another comment spam. I was wrong! You know what – you Stumbled and I got more than 500 hits today, and the day has just begun!

Many Thanks!

>> How can a search engine determine a great comment from comment spam?

I would put it another way.

How can a search engine determine a great content from average content?

I hope I have already answered half of it. Let me explain –

No, search engines cannot determine a great comment from a comment spam, but its the comment itself that determines whether its great or not – just like content.

Comments relevancy to the topic / post, the keywords in it and more importantly if any comment has answer to the a query searched – its most likely to help get the page a better rank.

>> The comments for your article are all quality comments. Do they count for something?

Yes they do! All the comments here are adding to the content of the page and knowingly or unknowingly comment writers are inserting some valuable keywords in their comments, that in turn helps to get this page high ranking.

>>Blogspot blogs have the rel=nofollow tag in their HTML and now it cannot be removed.

True! In fact all blogs have rel=nofollow in comment links. Essentially it means that the link juice will not follow to the linked page, however it helps the comment writer to advertise their site in the post. Therefore you see many bloggers commenting in a popular post.

>>That being said, I Stumbled this page and gave it a thumbs up.

Thanks once again!

The comments for your article are all quality comments. Do they count for something?

Blogspot blogs have the rel=nofollow tag in their HTML and now it cannot be removed.

That being said, I Stumbled this page and gave it a thumbs up.

Thanks

Good questions!

I got a good topic to write a new post.

You can find answers to your questions in my article “How Search Engines Treat Links From Directories”.

In short you need not worry if you are getting your site listed in web directories – paid or free. Its just that search engines hate if someone tries to spam the results. Paid links just to increase link popularity / Page Rank (PR) is one of them.

An unethical paid link is what Google and major search engines hate.

Thanks for inspiring me to write a new article.

I do NOT buy or pay for links. However, I do submit my sites to Directories because some send a large number of visitors to my sites. The problem and questions I have are: (1) what happens if you are listed in a FREE Directory, which at a later date begins to charge a fee for listing and it keeps all of the previously listed free sites? and (2) many free directories review sites for submission and list them at no charge, but also have a paid listing option available. Therefore, how does Google or any search engine distinguish between those people that do not pay for links, such as me, in the two senarios that I mentioned above? In the later case, you might say that the search engine would assume that featured links have been paid for–however, I have had several small directories list one or more of my sites as a featured site because the liked the sites.

It is one thing to just not consider a listing from a directory, but it is another thing to downgrade a site for having paid listings, when in fact the site owner hasn’t paid for any directory listings.

Thanks for any thoughts you may have.

Jaak http://seoapplied.blogspot.com

This is an excellent article for understanding which links are good quality and which should be avoided.