In my previous post, I explained why I disable the nofollow tag on blog comments and why I seek out similar blogs to interact with and add my insightful, intelligent, useful comments (does that sound vain or what?)
Looks like I’m not the only one looking for dofollow blogs. Google’s own keyword research tool shows that there are tens of thousands of searches for various combinations of the word “dofollow” every month. So, how does a webmaster find these dofollow blogs?
First Things First – Recognizing the Curse
Pretty but cursed?
I was telling my 8 year old son about SEO the other day, describing it all as this fascinating game with battles to fight and scores to win. After explaining pagerank and “link juice” I got to the “nofollow” part. “You see, Ron, a link with a nofollow has an invisible curse on it and so it cannot pass on the link points,” I told him.
For regular surfers, there is no way to know when a link has a nofollow tag. As a webmaster you could, of course, look at the source code, but you probably prefer a faster way to tell which is which.
Fortunately, Firefox has several plug-ins that do just that. These are mostly SEO plug-ins that have lots of bells and whistles, but they all perform one simple function as well: they highlight nofollow links so you can easily tell which blog “cursed” the comment links. I use Quirk Search Status Add-on for Firefox but you can search around and see if something else suits your needs better.
Dofollow Lists and Directories
With WordPress, the most popular blogging platform, having nofollow turned on by default, how do you find those blogs that enable comment affection?
Googling for dofollow brings up quite a few websites and pages that try to create lists of dofollow blogs. Some of them move on to create an entire directory around this, sorting the blogs out by PageRank and/or topic. Here’s the problem though -
- Lists are not up to date – For whatever reason, blog owners change their settings and switch nofollow back on.
- Lists have mostly SEO/webmasters blogs in them. That’s fine if that happens to be your area, but if you’re looking to interact with other kinds of blogs, you’re out of luck.
Actively Searching for DoFollow Blogs
How can you find Dofollow blogs through a search engine like Google? After all, not only are we looking for an attribute in the source code, we are actually looking for blogs that do not have that attribute.
What we can look for is an image that some bloggers (myself included) display on their blogs to tell the world that they dofollow. You can look for the image files through Google, or use the Google image search for “U comment, I follow”. The file names to look for are -
ifollowblue.gif, ifollowgreen.gif, ifollowltgreen.gif, ifollowpink.gif, ifollowpurple.gif, ifolloworange.gif, ifollowwhite.gif, ifollowmagenta.gif.
Remember: always check to make sure these really are dofollow blogs. Watch out for blog owners who don’t even know what dofollow means and put up the image to indicate that they will comment back on blog posts in your blog. Yes, some bloggers think that “u comment, I follow”, means that they will personally follow your blog link to comment back on your blog…
Putting it All Together
So, here is my own strategy for finding dofollow blogs that work for me:
- Start by going over existing lists/directories of dofollow blogs and find the ones that are on-topic and are indeed dofollow. This is a time consuming phase and in my experience, most of the blogs listed are in fact nofollow.
- Searching Google for the IFollow images (as explained above) and finding the gems.
- Make a list of quality blogs that are indeed worth interacting with. These should be blogs that are on-topic and actually worth reading. Make sure that the comments are well-moderated. I have yet to see a dofollow blog with spam comments that retained its Pagerank!
- Keep track by visiting regularly (I add them to my Google Reader to track new posts) and when a post of interest comes up, read, comment and interact.
It may be time consuming, but look at the benefits. You get to know people and truly interact with fellow bloggers that cover the same topic as you. Hopefully, these people monitor their comments carefully and weed out anything spammy, so you get quality backlinks too.
Now, if you decide to do that and want to share some of your findings, or if you want to offer your blog as a fellow dofollow blog, do leave me a comment about it. After all, if it’s good… you get a link back 
{ 21 comments }
I have been searching for dofollow blogs and forums for several months. This is the first time I have read about searching for the images. Thanks.
I am compiling my own private list. I have also noticed that dofollow blogs listed on dofollow lists are usually nofollow after they make the list. Probably from all the spam. I figure deleting the spam is just part of the job and comes with the territory.
It is good to hear you are planting seeds. Did your talk with your son lead to more question. If so, he gets it. aI would love to have an heir who gets it. Maybe a grandchild who doesn’t want to spend his time in a regular job (one sweet day.)
Hello,
It’s true that I’ve been searching for do follow blogs for sometime now, but that isn’t surprising. What really surprised me is the concept of explaining SEO to an 8 year old! That is really appreciable. Proves once again SEO is a perfectly explainable science and not magic.
I actually had a question. What if I conduct an “inurl:” search with “u comment I follow”? I mean using keywords inurl:ucommentifollow on google, is that gonna show up the blogs with do follow properties?
I must agree that the “image search” is definitely something I read for the first time here. Thanks for the tip, I’m going to give it a try.
Pinaki Kar´s last blog post ..BPH – Causes, Epidemiology and Medication
Thank you for your comment, Pinkai. I think your search for those terms would bring up mostly blog posts where the blogger is declaring switching to dofollow. It’s not a bad thing – just check to make sure they haven’t switched back later on. It won’t bring up blog posts with just the image unless the img tag states those words, I guess.
okay, that sounds good.
Pinaki Kar´s last blog post ..BPH – Causes, Epidemiology and Medication
Excellent information. I have learned quit a few very helpful blog marketing techniques from your blog. Thank You very much.
Have you heard about an desktop application called “fastblogfinder”.I personally didn’t like that very much.
This is good. The nofollow thing really changes the Internet and the way information is found. Google started the link popularity and page rank and now because people abuse it to rank in Google, now we have nofollow links so that Google doesn’t list them. Seems to me that the whole thing is Google’s problem to fix. They created it. In the meantime, it is good that we keep the Internet free and open, the way it is supposed to be.
Consultant´s last blog post ..Business Web Server
Thank you for the comment – I totally agree
Search of good dofollow blogs – this is something like science
. You must search them every day, turning over dozens of “bad” blogs, order to find the good one! But when you found it, post your comment, and record blog to your list of dofollow-blogs, this is not end yet! If you want to keep your list of do-follow blogs in actual state, you must one or two times a week visit blogs in your list and check their type. Unfortunately not only nofollow blogs became dofollow, but dofollow also often became nofollow.
True enough. Which is why you shouldn’t do this for pure SEO benefits – probably not worth your time in the long run.
It’s hard to find dofollow blogs that last because most of them end up disabling dofollow.
-Kai
Kai´s last blog post ..SEO
More sites should use dofollow.
Search engines like google will be forced to rank pages even with all the dofollow spam around.
I agree and thank you for your comment. I had to edit your name field btw – pls read the commenting policy.
Have you heard about an desktop application called “fastblogfinder”.I personally didn’t like that very much.
Foto Chika´s last blog post ..Foto Foto Syur Tanpa Disensor
Excellent information. I have learned quit a few very helpful blog marketing techniques from your blog. Thank You very much.
Review Specs´s last blog post ..Casio EX-Z90 12.1MP Digital Camera
I’m glad you enjoyed the blog. Please take a minute to read the commenting guidelines. I had to edit your comment for use of keywords in username.
Twitter: atlantaseos
May 18, 2010 at 5:21 am
I love reading tips like this from bloggers and in fact found your blog by doing a Google images search similar to the one you outline above. The next thing I’ll do this morning is install the firefox plugin!
I’ll be back again for sure, thanks for doing such a professional job.
thanks for the great tips! the part about searching google images is really a great idea. keep doing what you’re doing!
Sam´s last blog post ..House Cleaning Service 30006
Great tip on the plug in for Firefox. Thanks for the help
Josh Randall´s last blog post ..Garage Door Repair Johns Creek, GA
I wanna share few ways to find it:
Fill in google/yahoo search:
(1) intext:”your keyword” intext:”Dofollow -CommentLuv Enabled”
(2) “your keywords” intext:”Comment links could be nofollow free.”
Hope it helps you…
More info visit my blog.. thanks… keep sharing…
regards,
Online Tutoring Lessons´s last blog post ..Bad Credit Payday Loans
I did almost marked your comment for spam, since you used keywords instead of your name. I ended up editing it, since it’s a constructive helpful comment after all. I hope you visit again and contribute more, but please read the commenting guidelines and follow them.
Also, btw, why don’t you join the dofollow and comluv communities yourself? I notice you have neither on your blog and that’s not very nice…
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