B6S.net

Uh oh… not another post about the dofollow issue?

Blame Extreme John who just posted about removing nofollow blogs from his RSS reader. Since even the mighty Google thinks I’m an authority on the subject (this blog is ranked in the top ten results for “dofollow blogs”), I figured I need to give my input… again.

In his post, Extreme John refers to mutual linkjuice gifts and a “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” concept. I’d like to present a slightly different angle on this. I don’t dofollow with other bloggers in mind – I dofollow with surfers in mind. Here’s why.

The Heated Dofollow Debate

If you look at Extreme John’s post and the following comments, you could easily get the impression that most webmasters passionately support dofollow. In my experience, this is not the case.

Take Sitepoint Forums. If you want to start thread with lots of replies, use the word “dofollow” in the title. Supporting dofollow on blog comments over there is a surefire way to get flamed (no pun intended). If the people are in a good mood, they’ll just tell you you’re wasting your time. They could also mark you for a spammer.

To be honest, they have a point. Dofollow blogs can become spam magnets. Just visit the darker side over at the DP forums and run a search for dofollow blogs. Spammers all over the place, selling lists of dofollow blogs along with spam bots that will do the dirty work for you.

Thus, my first instinct was to go nofollow, because that’s what the “good guys” recommended. But then I gave the matter some thought and you can read more about my conclusions in this post. Bottom line – nofollow blogs get as much spam as dofollow blogs and it’s up to the blogger to click the “spam” link and trash the spam comments.

One more point for nofollow supporters to consider

Google (and other Search Engines) keep telling us that serving different versions of your page to surfers and search engines is a big No No. That’s why cloaking is a good way to get your site banned from the SERP’s.

I argue that the nofollow tag is in fact a form of cloaking. It’s showing your surfer one thing – a link to another site – while telling the search engine to ignore that very link.

If you think the link is bad, don’t have it on your blog. That’s part of your blogger duties and that’s why you should always monitor your comments and have spam filters in place.

If you think the link is valid, legitimate and useful to your visitors, there is no reason in the world to hide it from the search engines.

Nofollow has in facr become a tool for linkjuice channeling, aka link sculpting. By definition, it creates one picture of the web for users and another for search engines.

Now, if Google, or anyone else, wishes to devalue comment links in their algorithm, or to disregard them completely, that is entirely up to them. As a web publisher, I just want to have a clean page with no behind-the-scenes changes in the code that my surfers can’t see.

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:

1. 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.
2. Searching Google for the IFollow images (as explained above) and finding the gems.
3. 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!
4. 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

A short history of nofollow and dofollow:

1. Google comes up with the brilliant idea of using links to sites as indicators of site popularity/authority/importance. If you have more links pointing to your page, it’s more likely to score high in Google search results, providing you with more traffic.
2. Webmasters start the links race – trying to get as many links pointing to their website as possible.
3. Spammers abuse the concept by automatically adding links to their site from any place they can. Social media sites, including blogs and social bookmarking sites, become prime target because they allow visitors to “leave their mark” on a site.
4. Blogs are inundated by fake comments that are nothing but automated spam.
5. In an effort to stop the spam attack, Google announces the “nofollow” tag. Once attached to a link, this tag “cancels out” the link’s search engine optimization (SEO) effect.
6. Wordpress and other blogging platforms add the “nofollow” tag by default to all comments.

Now, here’s the problem:

Spammers have not stopped their spam comments. Using automated scripts, it costs them nothing to try and even with no SEO benefits, if their link is up, someone may just click it.

Blog comments however, have been cut out from Google’s picture of web activity.

I see no reason why on-topic useful and meaningful comments should not reflect on the commenter’s website. If he’s an active commenter in the market, doesn’t that lend more authority to his website?I think the “nofollow” on legitimate comments is helping no one.

My finger isn’t pointed at Google. The Google people just provide us with tools and then do their own thing of trying to get the best search results for their users. Fair enough. I think it’s up to bloggers to get rid of the automatic “nofollow” tags on their blogs. Moreover, I think the people behind Wordpress should at the very least provide an easy option in the Wordpress settings to switch the nofollow tag on or off.

Just to clarify: I do NOT want to see spam comments on any blog. Blog owners should and do fight back using spam filters such as Askimet for Wordpress. In my experience, Askimet is very effective in keeping out 99% of automated spam. As for comments that do go through – this is where the blog owner needs to stay involved, reading the comments and getting rid of any spam.

So, I’ll be doing my small share by disabling the nofollow tags on this blog and other blogs I run. If the blog is active and I want comments, I’ll be taking the time to review comments and weed out any spam that Askimet didn’t catch.

With a clear conscience of doing my share, I’ll move on to doing what many of us webmasters are already doing: seeking out dofollow blogs (i.e. blogs that disable the nofollow feature) to interact and add insightful, meaningful and useful comments there, along with a legitimate link back to my own blog. More on how to find these blogs in another post.

ETA:

Following some advice I got from Ed on PeculiarBlog.com who went back to nofollow, I’ve come up with some commenting rules for this blog. I am looking forward to comments and discussions, but anything that does not follow my own quality criteria gets canned.