How to Find Dofollow Blogs
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 
