A Guest Book You Shouldn’t Sign

April 22, 2010 – 9:55 pm

Some sites provide a “Guest Book” section where visitors are allowed to sign in and leave comments. Many of these guest books even permit HTML code, so you can leave a link back to your site.

You might think that by signing hundreds of guest books and adding your link, you will be able improve your website’s link popularity. Unfortunately that is not the case. Guestbook links are similar to Free For All links, which are not a real value addition for website popularity and carry very little significance with popular search engines.

Guestbook links are plugged in the same category as Free For All (FFA) links because these links can be added by any one (even by script), without any human intervention. This means that no one checks the content of the site before adding the link.

So it is not a very good idea and neither is it good practice to submit your links through Guest Books. If you are a website owner and you want to integrate a Guest Book application to your website, then best practices advocate that it is better to opt for a moderated Guest Book software, where each post can be approved manually.

You can also opt for a Guest Book software which includes rel=”nofollow”, in both the URL field and the hyperlinked URL’s in the posts. Either feature can be enabled to block posts, which contain links. This allows only those visitors to post who really want to leave a relevant and valuable comment and not those who just visit Guest Books for the sole purpose of link building.