Just Ask Kim: Now Fully DoFollow Enabled!

In Blogging - Posted on May 9, 2010

May 9, 2010 · 29 comments

in Blogging

Buffer

Now A Fully DoFollow Enabled Blog!

Hot! Fresh! … and now with more link-love for you!

What does DoFollow mean?

A few weeks back I wrote a post titled “What is DoFollow? What is NoFollow? What’s The Difference?” that outlined why this is important for you as a reader!

Super short summary….

Backlinks to your own blog, from a DoFollow enabled blog such as this one are worth approximately 10 times the SEO value as a link from a NoFollow blog. WordPress is by default nofollow on comment links. (Your blog is nofollow unless you’ve enabled the DoFollow plugin.)

Both the name-url link and the commentluv link of this blog are now DoFollow, so that is 2 DoFollow links just for commenting!

Plus, if you utilize the keywordluv that I have enabled, to use “name@keywords” in the name-url field, your name-url link will have the correct anchor text, getting you EVEN MORE SEO LOVE! Confused by what keywordluv is and how to make the most of it? Check out my post on keywordluv here.

You can greatly maximize your SEO return for commenting by tracking down and commenting regularly on DoFollow, Commentluv & Keywordluv enabled blogs! (This is why many SEO tools such as Market Samurai make it easy to locate DoFollow blogs.)

What Took So Long To Go (Fully) DoFollow?

By default, WordPress comments have a “nofollow” tag built into them. When I was just getting started, not only did I not know what this meant – but I didn’t know how to change it (or if I even should!)

While DoFollow links are a sweet gift to the commenters, there is a lot of fear and hype associated with turning a blog DoFollow.

One of the pieces of hype, that is just that, is that it will substantially negatively affect the blogs page-rank (PR) with Google. Sire, who’s blog averages a PR4 (which is very nice!), has a post talking about how DoFollow does not leech page-rank. If his post was not enough, I’ve also been doing some reading lately on how Google is now officially down-playing the impact that PR has in their search ranking mechanism. In fact, there’s a chance if you’re a new blogger this is the first time you’ve even HEARD of PR because emphasis has been taken slightly off of it. (It does still matter for understanding quality of backlinks however, so we can’t ignore it.)

The second piece of hype has a larger grain of truth in it. Enabling DoFollow leads to substantially more spam. This occurs for the same reason that YOU should chose to comment on a DoFollow blog. Because the links are worth so much more, DoFollow blogs get listed in DoFollow Directories and both real bloggers and real spammers alike will hunt them out!

Dealing with DoFollow Spam!

Akismet does a pretty darn good job keeping most of them flagged as spam that should be, and out of the pending area. Akismet actually works really well.. until your readers get smart, like my readers (that’s you!) did! Once my readers began to understand that deep-links to their blog (that’s a link directly to a page or post) had more SEO value than a link to their homepage, they began using that in the url field. That’s a SMART move, but because its used by spammers too, Akismet began sending ALL deep-linked comments to spam. So suddenly I was having to dig friends posts out of over 100 spam posts per day! (I’m fortunate that most of the Syndication Alliance community have gravatars enabled so it wasn’t too terrible, but it still was a lot of work – and – I tended to miss some occasionally.) Me missing real comments was simply not acceptable to me. You go through the effort to leave a high quality, thought provoking, sharing comment… I believe I owe you my best to make sure it gets posted!

I also use the Bad Behavior plugin, which blocks the IP address of known spammers and can also be a good way to minimize spam. I never saw this plugin have a serious impact but its highly rated and though of in the industry and I suspect I was just getting so much volume that it was hard to notice its impact. Nice little light weight plugin I will probably keep it.

While I tried very hard to keep up with the spam influx and to sort through the spam every single day to find your posts… it was making my life as a blogger very tedious and boring. There had to be a better way, to help both of us.

That’s when I discovered the simple little block-spam-by-math plugin. It initially had some coding issues that I hired my friend @denharsh from ShoutMeLoud to put his awesome team of wordpress coders to work fixing.They got it working correctly in no time flat.

I must say I’m absolutely in love with the plugin for SUBSTANTIALLY reducing the spam load and ensuring I can find your posts even if they end up in the akismet spam box.In the several weeks since I have put it in place, I’ve had a grand total of FIVE pieces of (real) spam. That is down from over 100 pieces per day! (The plugin blocks most but not all automated (bot) spammers, but some spam is generated by hand in the equivalent of sweat shops, sadly.) To learn more about the block-spam-by-math plugin and to get our updated copy check out my post on that topic!

I was using Lucy’s Linky Love, to make my blog partial DoFollow (makes the name-url field DoFollow after the same person has posted 3 approved comments). However, it was unable to affect the commentluv link (which remained NoFollow). I put it in place when I enabled KeywordLuv originally, hoping that it would help mitigate the spamming issue. It’s a great plugin to enable a partial DoFollow state. Effective today, I have replaced it with DoFollow by Semiologic. (This one is in the the plugin search, just check the creator name.) Sire is using the DoFollow by Kimmo that also works well, but is not in the plugin search.

Summary

At this point, there is absolutely no reason for me to NOT go fully DoFollow unless I was just in a mood to be a jerk! That’s pretty much how I look at it.

When we talk about leading with value, when we talk about giving to our community, when we talk about paying-it-forward … then this becomes just as much of a no-brainer as does using commentluv. (Don’t get me started on those that are still forcing me to log into Disqus & IntenseDebate and sometimes not even get a commenluv link, thinking I’m going to be happy commenting on their blogs.)

How can you get the same effect? Just grab the block-spam-by-math plugin (be sure to get my updated copy), Keywordluv and the DoFollow plugin and be sure Akismet is enabled and you’re good to go! If you upgrade your blog to full DoFollow, Commentluv and Keywordluv enabled be sure to let me know so I can come visit! {Better yet, comment over here, so I can get you listed!: Listing of Community DoFollow, Commentluv, KeywordLov blogs!}

DoFollow? NoFollow? What’s your thoughts? How does knowing if a blog is a DoFollow blog affect your decision to comment? Have you converted YOUR blog to DoFollow yet? Why or why not? As always, I appreciate all your thoughts, comments and syndication of this article!

Kimberly

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