Are the Do-follow Blogs Really Do-Follow?
There is so much hoopla over the do-follow and no-follow things over the Internet. So what the heck does they signify. The concept of Nofollow was intrduced by Google back in the year 2005 by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jasson Shellen. This was introduced to prevent unaffair link building strategy by many webmasters. With the introduction a user submitted link in a website like a blog or forum is marked as rel=”nofollow” attribute. This indicates the search engine spider not to give any weightage to such a link while calculating the link juice. At present many weblog and forum softwares like WordPress and BbPress automatically insert the rel=”nofollow” attribute to any links submitted by users.
No to no follow
To avoid this situation and encouraging users to provide their views and interact with other users and webmasters, the webmasters could not spare the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Many such individuals decided to pass the link juice from their blog/websites to their users (geunuine readers) so they come up with something called Do-Follow. So they came up with strategies that will remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute from a user submitted link (It is not gonna put rel=”dofollow”). Omission of the nofollow attribute lets the search engine spider to perceive the link as a normal link and it passes the link juice. Here is an example of how a comment looks like when rel=”nofollow” and without Rel=’nofollow” that’s with Dofollow attribute is present.
<a href='http://freelancetwins.com' rel='external nofollow'>Alex the Freelance Twin</a> <a href='http://www.swopster.com' rel='external'>Swopster</a>
As per my knowledge a fine webmaster and blogger called Colleen from GeekySpeaky is attributed as the original promoter and creator of Do-follow blog list. Which has been popularized by Courtney Tuttle with his D-List. At time this D-List was so popular and people started adding their blogs into the list that I got a lot of back links to this blog (Forgot to mention that I was among the initial few to start promoting inspired by Courtney Tuttle) that once my technorati ranking was as low as 40,000. The D-LIst contains more than 250 Do-follow blogs list which would have been the best way top get approximately 250 back links to any website. But wait I am yet to say the prime reason I am writing this post.
As I said this more than 250 lists of Do-follow blogs would have fetched as many back links. But that’s not true. Only recently got to know about it. I was reading a couple of posts in Digital Point forum, in services section I was surprised to find that many service providers are offering Do-Follow blog commenting service and they are getting orders like hell. I got hold of a couple of such service providers and found the list of blogs they are putting comment. Much to my dismay they are following the D-List in close paralance. So what I did was I just checked a couple of blogs from the D-List and I was surprised to find that they are no longer supporting the movement. I mean they are not passinng any link juice to ur website as the rel=”nofollow” attribute is quite visible in the user submitetd links. I checked almost all the links one by one and more than half is no longer Do-Follow blogs. So are the serevice takers in DP being cheated by the service providers?
I can not say they are being cheated knowingly. The service providers are putting the comments in DoFollow blogs but they are not sure whether the blogs are do-follow or No-Follow. They are just blindly following the easily available D-List in the Internet.
Now the question definitely arises why the webmasters and Bloggers who joined the Do-Follow movement earlier are now opting out of it? It has a single unanimous answer and that is comment spam. After I joined in the D-List I have seen the comment count in my blog has increased exponentially and most of the comments seems as if they are for the purpose of link building and the commenter or reader does not have any genuine interest in commenting. They use all funny anchor texts just for the purpose of SEO. Such instances has made many Do-followers to become no-followers.
Now here is something for you. I stumbled upon this post in DP where the guy is selling Genuine Do-follow blogs, forum and Directory list. I got one by paying 10 bucks to him and it seems this is the only genuine list available now. It has a whole 61 such links and they are Do-FOLLOW atleast that what it seems to me till now.
Comment by BlogsDNA on 19 July 2008:
@ajay well some like this even i am feeling having do follow on my blog i have seen people even comment on each and every post that to say some thing like “thanks for sharing” or “wow this nice”
Sooner or latter i am going to put back my blog to nofollow
Comment by Ajay M on 19 July 2008:
To prevent such comment spammer I hv an excellent idea and I am going to write about that in a few days.
Comment by BlogsDNA on 19 July 2008:
Well then i am waiting for that article.btw is their is any problem with your webhosting i am getting apache default page when i try to access you http://techiezone.in/ or http://www.techiezone.in/
Comment by Ajay M on 19 July 2008:
NO as such but I am still working on my home page and last night I forgot to upload the semifinished index.html file and morning I went to work, so it was showing the apache default page.
Comment by lottozahlen on 19 July 2008:
The funny thing is, almost every blogger who joined the dofollow-idea has at least posted one thread that deals with exactly the same topic as yours…. it seems there is no obvious solution on how to handle the follow/nofollow issue…
Comment by Used Cheap Laptops on 21 July 2008:
For me do-follow is a great promotion and traffic resource and it greatly enhances networking with other bloggers and brings me lots of good traffic all around. I like the do-follow and any SPAM is easily handled by Akismet, so that is not a problem.
Thanks,
Comment by hank on 25 July 2008:
There really is no one answer for it – the whole point of blogging is to find interesting content – if it is dofollow, then great but you should be looking to increase your own knowledge or interest in a subject – it’s a slippery slope for sure…
Comment by webmaster on 29 July 2008:
Going dofollow will bring more comments on our blog posts. With this, there is also some chance that your bog is spammed in bulk by people who used to spam a particular website with thousands of automated messages
Comment by Monavie on 29 July 2008:
That is the sad thing about spam, there really doesn’t seem to be a way to stop it. I mean, there is Askismet and comment moderation, but you still have to have time to go through and allow or deny the comments. I’ve noticed a lot of Do-Followers moving to No-Follows also.
Comment by Stoffe on 30 July 2008:
For me do-follow is a great promotion and traffic resource and it greatly enhances networking with other bloggers and brings me lots of good traffic all around.
But Akismet is a great Anti-Spam-Plugin, which shows much effect!
Comment by Bleuken on 2 August 2008:
Some are using CommentLuv and KeywordLuv wordpress plugins to support the No nofollow tag. Me i’m still studying the case if this plug-ins will help my website improve its popularity but based on my current readings about it, it’s a great way of attracting commentators. Still I’m not sure about it.
Comment by Best Web Hosting Reviews on 5 August 2008:
Frankly I think that it is good to see people taking a stand against Google’s decree, they aren’t a deity as much as webmasters would like to believe. Just because a search engine says they want people to do things so that they will profit more from it, doesn’t mean people need to comply. Thanks for this post
Comment by Linkvana on 12 August 2008:
I’ve found dofollow to work MUCH better for getting people to my blog. It’s an invite for marketers which allows great networking potential.
Comment by abdul on 15 August 2008:
Your intentions on Do follow are exactly right.. Webmasters should gave permissions to their regular visitors to comment in their websites.
Yep i do agree with spam commenting. But there are many plugins are available which can remove spam comments…
Thank you.
Regards,
Abdul
Comment by Clement on 20 August 2008:
For six months now, I have installed the NoFollow Free plugin on my blog. I have also noticed an overwhelming number of comments coming in, most of them spammy, off-topic and empty. For some weeks now, I have been contemplating to revert my blog to the Nofollow status but I am still not yet decided.
But one of the things that I have done for the time being is that I have tightened my comment policy…I tell people that their comments must be on-topic and must add value to the discussion.Otherwise if I notice that some comments have been left just for the purpose of getting my link juice, I will delete them without notice. And I have left a link to my Comment policy just above the Comment form so that everyone who wants to comment can see it and know in advance in case they want to leave empty comments. On the other hand, Akismet is also doing a great job.
Comment by wisdom on 20 August 2008:
Most webmasters understand the importance of having links pointing to their site. Commenting can help this. Many programs are out their that makes finding dofollow blogs an easy process. Even so, I think Akismet can not handle user submitted comments that may be not genuine. So it is left to the blog to moderate them.
Comment by zedge on 30 August 2008:
For sure do-follow blogs can be a source of free backlinks, and thus help many new webmasters to start off..
Comment by NJ Web Design Firm on 2 September 2008:
I embrace the “do-follow” comment movement and I think the best way to avoid spam is to use something like Akismet with wordpress, rather than make all comments links nofollow. It works great for me!
Comment by mauritius on 3 October 2008:
Do follow blogs can increase your hits, many webmasters are there to get a free backlink.
Comment by punkypaige on 25 October 2008:
I hope that people who are posting comments to do follow blogs are saying the truth. I observe that they always say Thank you for this information, great post or very informative.
Comment by Felix on 9 December 2008:
the problem with do follow enabled blogs is that some are abusing it and if this is the case well the site should be equipped with different anti-spam measures.
Comment by Linkvana on 18 January 2009:
Do follow links are really the only way to fly in terms of SEO, but if you just want to get links to help with indexing, and maybe a bit of traffic, then no follow is still useful I guess.