Member Avatar for GordonUK

Hi there,

I have a social networking website and I have put some graphic comments and text links on myspace in my friends comment sections but they are not appearing as backlinks whenever i have looked for them and I just wanted to know why?

I also created a facebook profile too for my website and again it is not appearing as a backlink.

Any help with this will be gratefully received.

Many thanks.

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Dani AI

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Good point from — social sites are not a reliable source of SEO backlinks. Adding a few practical checks and fixes that go beyond the original replies.

Public visibility and crawler access matter first. If the comment or profile section where you posted is only visible to logged‑in users or friends, search engines cannot see it. View the page while logged out (incognito), then view the HTML source to confirm a real <a href="…"> pointing to your site exists in the server HTML (not only added later by JavaScript). Platforms also commonly mark user links so search engines treat them as “do not count” (see the industry guidance on nofollow-type attributes) and may block or limit crawling via robots.txt, which prevents indexing (robotstxt.org and see discussion of link attributes at Google Search Central).

Quick checks you can run

  • Open the social page in an incognito window to verify public visibility.
  • View source (Ctrl+U) and search for your domain to confirm a plain anchor and whether a rel="nofollow"/similar attribute is present.
  • If you have shell access, a simple fetch can show the raw HTML:
    curl -s 'https://www.facebook.com/SomePublicPage' | grep 'yourdomain.com'

    If the link is injected later by JS, or hidden behind login, crawlers won’t see it.

What to do instead

  • Use public, crawlable places for link-building: your own blog, guest posts, public press/industry sites, and public pages on social networks (not private comments).
  • Rely on social posts for traffic and discovery, not for direct PageRank.
  • Monitor recognised backlinks with Google Search Console and use high-quality outreach rather than mass-posting comments (spam can lead to account removal and no SEO benefit).

For background on why many social links aren’t treated as ranking signals, see Moz’s explanation of nofollow and the Google Search Central discussion of link attributes.

Member Avatar for thefandango

Myspace and facebook redirect you - click on a link on myspace and you get the page saying you are now leaving myspace right? That is a redirect and means links out of myspace etc are not picked up as backlinks. So its good if you get traffic, but for SEO backlinking its utterly futile.

Check my signature for a way to build proper backlinks with lots of free info in our knowledgebase for our members.

Member Avatar for GordonUK

Thanks thefandango,

Your advice has helped me so much! I always wondered about that and now i know.

And yes i will definitely check your signature for a proper way to build back links.

Thanks again for all your help it is very much appreciate.

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