One for the Technically minded

[gky45]

My question refers to links etc.

If a comment is posted on a blog and a url forms part of the text of the comment ie.

"lorem ipsem blah blah (http://www.yourdomain.com )etc etc."

Does this qualify as an inbound link and would it be recognised as such?

The reason I ask is that with so much comment spam around, more and more blogs are adopting the "rel=nofollow" instruction and all that this implies etc.

However a url used within a conversation without an href instruction does not attract a nofollow tag - does this mean that the url is of no use or benefit?

I am trying to reconcile a large number of published articles out there on behalf of my writers and an appallingly low inbound link total and this issue has just been brought to my attention. It would appear that quite a few publications are publishing articles written by my chaps and then not crediting them with proper Resource Boxes hence we get no benefit at all but if I can persuade my guys to include at least one url reference within their articles then we may be able to start getting somewhere.

[achronister]

It does not count as an inbound link without the href. It might show some up when searching for the exact domain name, but that's it.

[incrediblehelp]

aaron is correct

[gky45]

That would explain a lot, cheers lads thanks very much - you have answered more questions than you realise.

Once again thanks very much.

[hhheng]

Forums can automatically parse www. and http:// etc. Why you don't enable it?

No follows will not help your anything in backlinks.

[adbart]

Unfortunately not, but I've always thought that this should be the case...

It's quite often that people will mention websites but forget to link them up (through lack of knowledge, laziness, or otherwise).

My rather pragmatic suggestion to Google and others would be to include these 'textual references' to a website within their algorithms.

Looking forward to being flamed on this.... :-)