subject: NoFollow Or DoFollow - What Is Better For Your Blog? [print this page] NoFollow Or DoFollow - What Is Better For Your Blog?
Blogging and Networking through blogging have become big business in the last five to ten years. With the release of ready-made Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Wordpress, blogging is now something that anyone who has expertise on any subject can now do. In the blogging world, a tremendous amount of information and content is produced each and every day and released to the public in the form of posts that cover any and all topic imaginable. Topics covering science, technology, business, politics and any other subject that is being talked about. That being said, a tremendous amount of money is involved through topical advertising. One of the largest forms of blog advertising is Search Engine Marketing (SEM). A blog that ranks well in search engines for competitive and high paying keywords is a potentially very lucrative piece of virtual real estate. Key to having a website or blog that ranks competitively or with a high Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is it's backlink structure.
Comment Spam. Since the discovery of the importance of a comprehensive and natural as well as extensive backlinking structure, any and all techniques for gaining backlinks pointing go one's site has been and continues to be exploited by webmasters. Some are ethical, others are not so ethical. Whatever the technique that is used, backlinking is a must if a blogger is going to compete in today's search engine market.
One form of backlinking that has been used extensively is commenting on blogs. It is very common for blogging platforms written in PHP to have commenting set up so that the name of the visiting commenter is turned into a hyperlink pointing to their URL of choice. For this reason, commenting on blogs changed from a method of interacting socially and professionally to a method that focused on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a field of study at the heart of SEM. Over time, the value of blog comments because so high that wares were written specifically for the automation of this process.
NoFollow and DoFollow. Links by their very nature are dofollow, meaning that a webmaster places a link on their site pointing to another site that they consider a relevant resource. This expression of relevancy has great value. Once this value was understood by webmasters, blog owners began to be and continue to be over-run by automated commenting bots released onto the net for the sole purposed of embedding links to be indexed by search engines knowing that these links would be counted as votes of relevancy towards the site receiving the link. This eventually gave rise to the nofollow tag, a tag designed around and agreed upon by the major search engines as a means to eliminate the effectiveness of this technique. After the creation of the recognized nofollow attribute, commenting on blogs lost much of it's perceived value. That being said, having a blog without the nofollow attribute applied can and still is a great way to attract SEO savvy visitors if done correctly.
Comments and Lists. Removing the nofollow attribute is a great way to attract visitors and build your list if you are an email marketer, but a few clever steps need to be taken if a blogger is going to avoid being overrun by bots. The first thing to do is to remove your nofollow tag from your comments. If you are using Wordpress, this can be done easily by installing the NoFollowFree Plugin. This removes the nofollow attribute from any part of the comment be it the name or links that appear in the comment itself. Next, install the SI Captcha Plugin. This completely eliminates bots from overrunning your blog and commenting on it.
Trading Links for Emails. Now you have to even the playing field by prompting commenters to join you mailing list in exchange for their dofollow link. Again, this is easy to do if you are running Wordpress because there are two plugins available specifically for this purpose. The plugin you would use depends on what mailing service you use as means of managing and blasting your list. If you use a third party such as GetResponse you would of course use the OptinComments plugin for Wordpress. If you are using a self hosted mail list manager such as PHPList so as to save yourself the monthly mailing service fee, you can essentially do the same thing with the PHPList Comments plugin for Wordpress. Both plugins do very well.
Linking Freely. Personally, I believe in linking freely. I have removed the nofollow attribute from my blog and link to visitor sites that I consider relevant and useful to my other visitors. I have enjoyed doing so and will continue to do so indefinitely. With the SI Captcha and email capturing plugins installed, I am building my list at the same time.
