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It used to be the case that when commenting on a blog that had a high Google PageRank, you’d get a high quality link back to your own site which would help you rise through the Goggle rankings. However, since people realised that they were losing their own hard-earned PageRank through allowing this, more and more people have started to use “nofollow” on their links to protect themselves. Google even wrote an article on it on their official blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html.
Essentially, this works by adding the tag “nofollow” into all your links (i.e. <a href="http://www.johnlandells.com/" rel="nofollow">John's Tech Blog</a>) which instructs spiders that visit your site from the major search engines not to follow the links when looking for new content. All the major blogging engines (such as Wordpress, Blogger, etc.) use this technology by default for any comments that are posted, and it’s rare that anyone goes to the trouble of disabling this functionality. After all, why would they???
With this in mind, I found it very interesting that today I was offered a free piece of software called “Comment Sniper” (you can find it at http://www.commentsniper.com) which promotes the outdated technique of commenting on popular blogs in order to raise your PageRank. Since it mainly targets the popular blog sites, I failed to find a single blog that wasn’t using “nofollow”. It works in conjunction with Skype to send you SMS messages when new posts are available to comment on, so it actually costs you money in terms of Skype credit!
In my opinion, this is clearly a great example of “you get what you pay for”! 
