Nofollow is an attribute that can be added to a hyperlink preventing Google from passing link credit to that site rel=”nofollow”. Link credit is one of the major factors Google considers when determining how authoritative your site is. You will these tags on to blog comments, and on sites like Wikipedia. It was created to fight dirty spammers, spam bots, and anyone trying to get a free link without adding any value to the site.
Dofollow is the practice of removing the nofollow tag from your links. In certain circles it is becoming the “in thing” to spread the link love.
Example badge from U Comment I Follow wordpress plugin
Pros
Share the Link Love
If a webmaster posts a legitimate comment, then does it really hurt to share the link love? Everyone wants to build their link popularity, but if it can be done by helping to contribute to other’s thoughts and ideas then it seems natural.
Reward people for taking the time to write quality comments
You don’t need to accept every comment. One that is not legit usually screams spam.
Discount Canadian Pharmacy Says:
“Your post is good. I know many peoples who also have this problem”
It isn’t hard to filter out the blatant spam. If you get hundreds of comments to your blog, then you might want to consider the Link Love Plugin, which allows you to specify the number of comments required before the visitor gets a link credit.
If you are interested in dofollow plugins Andy Beard has The Ultimate List Here. He has become a dofollow evangelist, with a great amount of information about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the dofollow movement
Encourage cross linking across sites
Allowing link credit naturally encourages cross linking amongst similar sites. You say legitimate comments should come from the heart right? As an SEO, much of my time is spent link building as opposed to leisure blog reading. If I can provide a meaningful comment to a blog and gain a backlink as a result, I will read and contribute everywhere that I can.
Note: You have to actually READ the article, and write a comment that isn’t limited to “Nice”, or “Cool…”. You still have to read articles and posts that interest you, so you can provide a meaningful contribution.
Cons
May cause comments to be less genuine
If you advertise your dofollow blog, chances are you are going to get more spam. This is just a natural result of sticking your bleeding finger into an ocean of sharks. You may start to get comments from people who just breeze over the article, and post a comment. This amigos, is called manual comment spam.
Not to say that these comments aren’t genuine, but you just have to be a little more careful while accepting comments.
Too many external links
If you have a lot of comments for a particular post, you might end up with hundreds of external links. This has been known to dilute the sites page rank, and cause it to loose favor with Google.
Vandelay experienced a direct decrease in traffic after removing the nofollow link. Read the post here.
Bad Neighborhood
You might have people who write genuine comments, but link to a bad neighborhood… EG link farms, spam sites etc. If your site passes link credit, then you might get penalized.
Conclusion
I am all for giving back to contributing readers, but it requires a careful watch. Removing the nofollow attribute might be something to consider if you have time to ensure the commenting doesn’t get out of hand. Plugins like the Link Love plugin, allow you to give something back, while still maintaining the integrity of both your posts and your posts page rank.
March 18th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Will you Follow the DoFollow Movement
Read why you should join the dofollow blogging movement. Will doing so cause the spammers to flock in numbers? Read the pros and the cons of joining the dofollow movement
March 18th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Will You Follow the DoFollow Movement
Read why you should join the dofollow blogging movement. Will doing so cause the spammers to flock in numbers? Read the pros and the cons of joining the dofollow movement
April 8th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
I am totally in on this movement. I have started using it on my newest site and will be implementing it on my others soon.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:23 am
I believe that Google takes outbound links into consideration when determining relevance, and that a small number of good quality relevant outbound links helps boost your positioning somewhat. It may not be a huge factor, but every little helps.
July 6th, 2008 at 1:58 am
I have been using commentluv plugin in one of my blog. Start from there i have receiving quite many of the comments. I also take some time to clean up the spamming comments too. Anyway that is the best way to rewards those who are giving their comments a juice linkback.
July 6th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
You brought up a point I always wondered about. Why did we ever start with NOFOLLOW tags when we as blog and site owners have the power to delete Spam links anyway?
August 15th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
[...] would like to thank John at Meta Spring for his nofollow article: http://www.metaspring.com/blog/seo/follow-dofollow-movement/ addthis_url = [...]
September 9th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
@ I Quit - it’s true, you can always delete any spammy comments. My blog is a “dofollow” one - I don’t see any benefit to adding to this nofollow mentality.
September 15th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I think the dofollow movement is going to be a good thing to allow small sites to get noticed on google.
September 15th, 2008 at 11:20 am
thanks.. looking to get a dofollow blog! will help :)
September 15th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
The dofollow movement helps us all compete with larger sites by spreading links around to small blogs.
September 23rd, 2008 at 6:17 am
I agree that do follow is a good thing. It is something I will think about for my own tattoo website.
September 24th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Read why you should join the dofollow blogging movement. Will doing so cause the spammers to flock in numbers? Read the pros and the cons of joining the dofollow movement +1
September 27th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
yes, i’ll follow!
October 6th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Hi
I could not agree more, I have been using dofollow links on all my blogs for 6 months now and it is definately worth the hassle of a few spam comments.
October 9th, 2008 at 2:14 am
How can I find dofollow link on the site without Wordpress?
Thanks
October 9th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Im curious on what you guys feel on those who make people register to comment? Is this something you would recomend?
thnx!
October 14th, 2008 at 5:00 am
Bold move. Next one will be keeping an eye out for spammers. And to answer the previous post, don’t make people register just to post a comment.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:30 am
I am still 50/50 on the issue. I do think it attracts more spam comments - but these are easily deleted and I already get a lot of spam comments. I also wonder if the comments add any value to the blog. For now, I think they at least encourage more people to comment.
October 24th, 2008 at 3:54 am
Bold move. Next one will be keeping an eye out for spammers. And to answer the previous post, don’t make people register just to post a comment.http://www.topxxxzone.com
November 8th, 2008 at 1:39 am
i feel that the introduction to dofollow plugin is very supportive for bloggers. It not only helped the bloggers to remove nofollow tags from the links but it also helped to genarate traffic.So i think it is a good post for bloggers.
November 19th, 2008 at 6:24 am
Such a wonderful post delivering the knowledge about Dofollow and Nofollow
attributes.Such knowledge is not only helpful but also very essential for bloggers.By the help of this post bloggers can remove Nofollow tags from their links.Bloggers should utilize this information.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:12 am
I have been going back and forth on this one. My blog is new so i want to help others like myself, like now, but on the other hand, will this take more time for me to monitor and watch. I may do it and if it does not go well I can always undo it again :)
Thanks for the thoughts broken down like that
November 28th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
thank you so much
November 28th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
esarp satisi
tesekkurler
November 28th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
beni bi saat urastirma oke de yazimi yayinla yeter.
November 28th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
thank you so much . see ya
December 1st, 2008 at 7:42 am
Hi,
I am quite new in the field of blogging so I can say that your post is a bundle of good knowledge for me.The info about dofollow and nofollow is really helpful for me.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Such a wonderful post for me.I am glad to got this info about the Dofollow.Now removing no follow tags is quite easy for me .
January 12th, 2009 at 6:24 am
I do !, I am removing no follow on my blog.
Thanks for the info, I will add the picture to :)
January 27th, 2009 at 11:19 am
[...] I would like to thank John at Meta Spring for his nofollow article: http://www.metaspring.com/blog/seo/follow-dofollow-movement/ [...]
February 12th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
If you want to grow your community no follow for comments will help build trust. As your blog grows it a good idea to monitor the comments that do not contribute to the post or discussion.
February 13th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I am so glad that the do follow movement is growing. There is a lot to say for qulaity comments and quality blogs
February 14th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
I just found your blog following a link, it’s nice, but I hope you can update it more often, hehe, because the information that you have here is quite interesting. Keep going!
February 16th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Wow a really good post, I really liked your blog!
February 19th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Will I lose my PR pretty fast if I make my blog a do-follow? Plz reply.
February 19th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Wow, thanks for the information. I always wondered were everyone was getting the u comment I follow badge. Thanks for sharing.
February 22nd, 2009 at 7:33 am
I don’t have a blog so I can’t follow THEY dofollow movement. But it’s a good development. Keep it up!
March 4th, 2009 at 5:19 am
I am testing a twofold experiment with U comment I follow sites to see if people are living up to the claim and also see if posting works and how. To see how posting a link works I have also created a twofold test. 1) Leave an interesting request. 2) See if the link works.
I am trying to build a list of really good SEO Tools and resources and am asking you and anyone else to contact me and add something useful to the list.
Keep up the good work.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
I am always searching online for articles that can help me. Thank you very much.
March 13th, 2009 at 5:39 am
I found this usefull also, thank you
March 15th, 2009 at 12:06 am
Haha ^^ nice, is there a section to follow the RSS feed
March 19th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Thanks for that interesting perspective, I found this searching for reasons to use the I follow way, I did have the concern of it causing spam comments to go up, not sure yet of that is the case as I am still on the fence about it, would be interesting to get a better overall view of the blogosphere as a whole to see if that has caused a bigger spam problem.
Still deciding. :)
Rob
April 8th, 2009 at 8:02 am
I am a big fan of dofollow, it helos to create the debate that the internet is all about.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
We need to promote dofollow movement in Russia. Thanks.
July 26th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Is there a way to convert my wordpress blog to a do follow blog?
August 13th, 2009 at 7:57 am
A lot of us are faced with this issue. For blogs that need to rely on good comments, allowing dofollow can bring in a larger audience.
August 20th, 2009 at 3:29 am
DoFollow - good idea, but the spam in large amounts will not give this idea a wide spread of (((
December 8th, 2009 at 12:47 am
Good post, and interesting comments for each argument. I didn’t even realize “dofollow” was an option now, but it’s certainly something I’ll consider adopting on my own site.
Thanks!
December 8th, 2009 at 6:05 am
[...] Ernsting presents MetaSpring Blog | Will You Follow the DoFollow Movement? posted at MetaSpring Blog, saying, “A few months back the Do-Follow tag was added to blogs [...]
January 2nd, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Don’t like the concept with dofollow as a general rule too much. Googles job is to help people who search find what they are looking for, which using dofollow will make it more difficult to do. Instead there will be professional spammers who will litter blogposts…
I personally like the concept where people vote on comments, articles etc. When enough people vote positively, then you get a link with dofollow as a ‘prize’ for actually adding value.