OK, I’ve been meaning to do this for some time but it is finally official.
WebsiteBuilding.biz has gone dofollow. Or is that nofollow free?
All links, by default, pass some fraction of a pagerank or search result promotion. Some search engines wanted to curb the power of blogs as a means of promotion, so they convinced the blog software writers to add this new relation to links added by users: Rel=”Nofollow”
This relation would tell search engine spiders to ignore the link! Well then, what’s the point of leaving a great comment and including your backlink? Hope someone is so moved by the comment that they personally check out your website?
Not very likely.
Here’s how I see it. I’m a comment moderation hawk. If someone leaves a spammy link, I’m going to make it spam and never think about it again. If they add something useful, I want them to get some credit to their website for it. Now, most of my posts are hyper-targetted so the overall traffic I’m bringing in is pretty low. Chances are, anyone coming in from a search engine is going to be directed toward a purchase or a coupon they can use to get discounts on that purchase. You’re probably not going to get a lot of click throughs from my site so I can guarantee that nofollow’ed links aren’t going to do anything for you. At least with nofollow removed and “dofollow” enabled, you’ll get some of my weak PR3 pagerank juice flowing to your own website.
These backlinks are as good as any other – well, once you consider the topic relevancy, total number of outbound links, pagerank, etc…
I’ve used dofollow links on other sites, and its been successful so far. This site, however, is my #1 source of income so the plugin is only being used on a trial basis. If I see ranks slip (which I kind of doubt) I may just have to pull the plug on the backlink party.
By the way, there is no code or relation or property that is actually called “dofollow.” This is just some SEO jargon 🙂
If you haven’t posted a comment here before, you will need to have one approved before you can start dropping links everywhere.
So whaddya waiting for? Add some comments and get some backlinks. Just remember – if it isn’t useful, its not going to get approved. I would prefer it if you used a name before your keywords in the anchor text – if I want to respond I should have some way to let you know I’m talking to you.
It will be interesting to see if your PR drops. I have read that the latest Google PR update caused some dofollow blog’s PR to drop, but I don’t think anyone really knows yet.
I’m starting to wonder about the value of PR these days. I suspect I have more traffic with a low PR blog, because it is dofollow, than some higher PR sites.
The traffic to my dofollow blogs have increased since going dofollow, so I am paying less attention to PR.
Mike
Actually, I’ve been amazed that my other two do-follow blogs are the ones with the higher traffic & pagerank. I usually don’t authorize links out to PR 0 blogs because that’s typically a sign of penalty, and I don’t want to endorse sites that Google has already slapped.
As far as incoming links, I did notice that some of my EzineArticles ended up on shady domains and actually one of my Category pages went to N/A from 1 after that happened.
I think that the boost in traffic when adding dofollow links is mainly artificial because of all the blog owners coming to the site and looking for a way to add a backlink.
Google should not penalize sites with dofollow, because it’s really not such a bad thing having dofollow links pointing to various sites.
But, after all, it’s Google we’re talking about (the big poppa, the big brother – you name it) and it always had a way of his own.
Did you see any difference in PR and traffic after you changed it to dofollow ?
Nah, not much of an immediate change at all. Needless to say though, my traffic in 2009 and 2010 (dofollow) was much better than my traffic in 2008 (nofollow). I’m pretty sure that has more to do with general growth of the site, though.
Hey well you were first on google for a search “do follow webmaster blogs” and I notice you allow dofollow links yourself so it hasnt affected your weight at all. Thanks for the background info I think your right.
Yup, the only catch is that new commenters will need approval if they’re putting links in. This can slow things down a bit since I don’t check up on the site as often as I probably should 🙂
Some great Google query commands to use here, not many people know of them, Thanks. So are wordpress and moveable type blogs nofollow by default? Or does the blog owner have to change it to that?
Nice to see you are helping out others with this do-follow blog, I found it on the top of the S/E’s would like to hear more bout your opinion on Google’s new panda update. thnx for the link, T