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A few years ago comment spam was a huge problem. Any site that accepted comments, such as blogs and any site that had a visitor log was pummelled with thousands of spam messages per day. Search engines decided to address this by creating the nofollow attribute for links, which is basically a way of saying “don’t trust this link”. Site visitors can still see and click the link, but most search engines agreed to ignore that link. Their thought was that by ignoring the link the motivation for posting thousands of links at a time would be clipped. Most blog software and CMS packages adopted the use of nofollow almost immediately.
This was only partially succesful, comment spam is still a huge problem. Today there is a growing community of search marketers reversing the trend by not only removing the nofollow attribute from their site, but also keeping a list of sites that “dofollow” their links. If a site owner wishes to remove the nofollow attribute the software must be modified, though there are plugins available that make this easy for most blog software.
Link building is one of the holy grails of SEO, so any site that passes link juice to commenters is valuable within the SEO community. This makes getting a link as easy as leaving a comment on a site. Do a search for nofollow or dofollow and you’ll find several sites with lists. The three that I’ve found the most helpful are:
- http://courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/
- http://www.stephanmiller.com/the-ultimate-dofollow-blog-list/
- http://nicusor.com/do-follow-list/
Just as you might expect, these links don’t have much value. Most of the sites that pass link juice are PR3 or less, and if the site has any popularity at all your link will reside among dozens of others. If you’re going to post comments to earn links the best strategy is to post early and post often. Subscribe to that blog’s feed and try to be within the first few comments on a post, and try to do this for a number of posts. If your comments are informed and helpful, or contribute to the discussion, then you may even earn a few visits.
This blog is follows links. As an SEO I see the value of this, so this is a way to give back to the community. Your comment does have to add something though. If you’re commenting on a post that’s six months old, or your only thought is “nice blog” it will probably not be approved. I’m also not going to approve comments with links to porn, illegal or hate material.
3 Comments
The battle for keyword optimization, SEO works are indeed a neck-to-neck thingy thus alot of spamming are going on in blogs and other sites.Thanks for posting, two thumbs up to you!
I really appreciate that you took a chance on doing a “do follow” blog. I have been considering taking the ‘nofollow’ tag off of the blog on my site. I am a bit scared though. I wonder if you ever tracked how much your comments increased from the “nofollow” days to the “dofollow” days…?
Great blog. It has obviously worked for you.
Hi David, and thanks for your comment. My comments have increased across the board. I did this (passing link juice through comment links) as a method of stirring up some traffic, and comments, and it has worked. I’d say that I get a fair amount of bogus comments as well though, which I don’t approve. My rule of thumb is, you can say almost anything you want in the comment, but if you include a link then you need to use your name, not the name of a company or product. If you turn off the nofollow I hope it generates some traffic for you, too.