I believe fully in the “I Follow Movement” now 8 months after the whole thing started, and I want to give commenters the little bit of Google juice I can as a result of their link being followed from the comment area. However… I have to say I’m getting a little tired of the MANY, MANY comments I’m getting from people who put things like “Real Estate Atlanta” or “Best Web Hosting” in the name field. Most of the comments left by these people are clearly just intended to gain what they think is going to be a ton of Google juice from my site since it is now a PR6. They read somewhere on some site about how they can get “free PR6 backlinks” from the list of sites provided. Since the latest Google update this whole thing has gotten out of control, and I’m just getting a little tired of it.
It’s not that I don’t understand your motivation – I really do. You’re trying to grow your site/blog and build backlinks from high PR sites. I get it, but somehow that just doesn’t make me feel any less used and annoyed. I’m not the only one.
The thing is, you’re not really getting a PR6 backlink like you think you are. Yes, randaclay.com is a PR6 site, but each individual page within the site does not carry that same page rank. For example, if you left a comment on the most recent post the URL where your comment resides is has a page rank of 0. Google ranks each page within a site, not just the root domain. (this is how I understand the whole page rank thing based on my reading and research – if I’m wrong here, someone please correct me and point me to a reliable source)
Because of the large number of these kinds of comments I’m getting, I’m afraid I’m going to have to add to my comment policy that if keywords are left in the name field instead of your name, I will just delete the comment.
Also, I can’t emphasize strongly enough that this kind of link whoring practice is really not the best use of anyone’s time. There are much better ways of increasing the exposure of your site.