It is always a controversy ever since the “nofollow” for links was introduced by Google and some others in 2005. The question of whether you should make comment links dofollow is being disputed. You can hear the strong voices from both the sides and, I’m sure, none of them are less aloud. There are some bloggers grumbling for big-blogs turned to ‘nofollow’, and on the other side, those big-blogs run their scissors silently.
You will find every high PR website and blog made their link ‘nofollow’. Though, a link placed in them can be a good source of traffic back to your site, from SEO perspective, it is totally useless. Many new bloggers will find it bitter, but in my view, this is a must. It is good for health of web.
Here I want to argue, why you should NOT make your blog dofollow! You are most welcome to comment if you do not agree.
First of all, let me explain in brief, what this dofollow and nofollow is before this discussion.
What makes a blog dofollow or nofollow
World Wide Web (WWW) is a vast collection of web pages connected via hyperlinks. We call them links in common discourse. Links are inserted by HTML anchor tag ( < a >). This tag has some properties that you can set specifying attributes such as:
href= “http://icttrends.com” to tell the browser where the link should point. The link will take you to ICT Trends website in this example.
title= “Computer Exam Preparation” to display tool tip text when mouse pointer is over that link,
rel= “NOFOLLOW” to flag the link as nofollow.
There are many other attributes of anchor tag, but these many are sufficient for current discussion.
Here, what makes a link dofollow is the use of rel attribute. If the value of rel is “NOFOLLOW” the link is nofollow, otherwise it is dofollow.
What is the use of dofollow and nofollow attributes
This attribute helps search engines to decide whether the link worth followed or not while visiting (crawling) your post. It will visit those sites in your post that have ‘nofollow free’ links and will ignore others.
Here, a point to be noted is, you are not controlling search engines, you are just suggesting them which of those links worth visiting and which else are not. The final discretion is always of crawlers. You’ve done your duties and the rest is that of crawlers. But for any nofollow free link, it is counted as a vote – resulting to increased PageRank of the linked site. A link with nofollow attribute will be of no use improve its PR.
If you are a kind hearted, you’ll immediately feel why not to award dofollow if it does some good to them?
Advantages of Dofollow links
If you mark links in your blog with dofollow attribute, there are some advantages for you and for them where your link points to:
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Everybody loves dofollow links and they are attracted to leave a link to your site. This will increase user participation in your site. The blog will look happy with more life.
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You are rewarding your comment authors and other contributors with a link back to them that will be counted to increase their PageRank. Thanking them for their contribution will always be appreciated, isn’t it?
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There are many dofollow blog communities and you will get a quick exposure if you register and use those platforms. This way it is lot easier to promote your blog and get more comments and traffic.
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Making your blog dofollow will help you to improve Alexa ranking as it counts the traffic. If your blog is dofollow, it will be easier to get more traffic.
- What can be of more virtue than be a generous personality?
Surprised to see those startling benefits of dofollow when my post title is against it? But to dislike, first you should know the reasons why people like it so much. Before we decide, let’s check the drawbacks of dofollow links:
Disadvantages of Dofollow links
Everything has a dark side as well!
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When the links in your page are dofollow, you are losing some juice from your page. If you release many links than you are earning, what about negative PR?
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If somebody is attracted to comment with greed to get PR juice, do you expect quality comment or true to the heart? Majority will tend to write something that will be approved and their links get published!
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Spam comments won’t be much of concern when you’ve enabled Akismet, but still what about looking through every spam comments to check if any genuine comments gone there. It happens often. You’ll find some genuine comments fall on spam folder.
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Is it ethical to award blindly dofollow for everybody? Can you check every link in your blog whether they are worth following? If you can’t, how can you suggest search engine to follow a link or not.
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If you know, your readers comment just to get a link back to them, can you feel pride of your blog.
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Google won’t leave their PR algorithm as it is forever. What happens when it modifies slightly?
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Most of the blogs are dofollow at first and when they start realizing the value of links, they just turn to the next pole with a click. How long will you find it dofollow?
You might draw even more disadvantages and drawbacks of dofollow links for your blog. Now, let’s decide, shall we make our blog dofollow?
I am against dofollow links, be them in my blog or any other. You won’t wish to miss; I have my next post “Why not to make your blog dofollow”.
About Suresh Khanal
Hi Suresh, my blog is DoFollow and I look at it like this – when I start getting so many comments that I don’t have enough time to moderate them, then it’s time to turn off comments and not have them at all. I don’t see that happening for me any time in the near future. You see for me, this is really the point of my blog – I want people to ask questions. I know how hard it is to find answers especially when you’re just getting started, so I want to be able to interact with people and help them if they need my help, therefore comments are a must. In fact I take back what I said earlier, if I don’t have time to moderate comments to my blog then I will just stop writing.
Ileane@Basic Blog Tips recently posted…Power Twitter User In The Making
Thank you Ileane for your views. I truely respect them. We might have different objectives and different goals of blogging.
I agree completely with what you said regarding comments. Every blogger loves comments more than anything else. Yes it is the life blood.
I just intended to inform the advantages and disadvantages of ‘dofollow’ links in blog. I’m arguing whether we should let everything dofollow or not in my next post http://seommotips.com/seo/why-not-to-make-your-blog-dofollow/
Suresh Khanal recently posted…Do Ads Improve Your PageRank
A do-follow blog can attract more loyal readers + more spam! So… its something that we have to choose very carefully! If we want to go for a dofollow blog, then first we need to put up our defenses by installing very effective anti spam systems.
Pubudu @ TechHamlet recently posted…A Cool New Twitter is On The Way!
Thanks Pubudu for your words. I guess the equation should be ammended a bit:
Dofollow blog = loyal readers (?) + more spam + Google Penalty
Yeah, the dofollow, although it does have its advantages, to me imho is not worth the risk long term. It definately attracts spammers, and your blog ends up being on lists of “dofollow” blogs that float around out there that spammers will use simply to post a few comments and a link, then on to the next one on the list. It really isn’t helpful for building readership loyalty.
Awesome post though. Its great to point out all of the pros and cons for things like this, and I am sure it is helpful for a bunch of people who have debated which way to go.
Thank you OPzz for your words. I’m happy to find somebody who thinks like me!
Removing the nofollow attribute is quite something to consider if you have time to ensure the commenting doesn’t get out of hand. Because Dofollow blog even attract bad neighborhood as many commenter you have write genuine comments, but link to a bad neighborhood such as link farms, spam sites etc. If your site passes link credit, then you may get penalized for that.
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linking to bad neighbour often leads to a ban from google , recently a pr3 site Gadgetcage was banned for this reason and lost its PR Value
Sourish recently posted…Ipod Saved a US Marine from AK 47 Attack
Yes Souris, this is the greatest threat among bloggers who heavily depend upon the SEO traffic and PR Values. Allowing everybody auto-dofollow always invites the risk of falling in bad neighbourhood unknowingly! Better NOFOLLOW!
its much better to have the blog no follow..i love to see some dedicated readers on my blog
It won’t be true to say all the commenters on dofollow blog are false, but if somebody is commenting in nofollow blot, its really due to the content quality.
BTW, please use your real name. I have enabled commentLuv plugin and you can write yourname@your keywords to take benefits of.
do follow blogs are necessary to give power to a page and many commentator visit the blog to share knowledge and as a result traffic on that specific blog is increased.
That is very correct Jhon, I wished to talk about theoritical aspect in this post. Its in need a matter of personal preference and I don’t blame anybody for making their blog nofollow or dofollow.
do follow blog comments are really valuable as it results in good quality of backlinks.
really dofollow has many disadvantage as u told in your post
I love this post because I learned a lot from here.
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Great post though. Its great to point out all of the pros and cons for things like this, and I am sure it would really help a bunch of people who have been debated which way to go.
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The biggest disadvantage of using dofollow links in your blog comments is increased spam which can be tackled by enabling comment moderation and I really love dofollow blogs.
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I must not agree with this article …..SEO is the process to increase visibility of sites and get popularize on all the search engines and so that we are using so many factors to increase the link juice for ranking …blogging is most powerful process to get links and traffics for the sites so how could it be a disadvantage .
Do you think that it really matters if a site is a do follow or not as far as spammers go?
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I will be more interested to INJECT my link if I find that the link is going to be dofollow. I guess the same applies to those spammers too!
Why is it that your “comment love” is actually set to No Follow? I see that you say you are against do follow. I think your biting yourself in the ass with that. You can no longer hoard pr, every link is counted and the pr is divided evenly between every link on page do follow or not. The no follows are simply a dead end road, no juice to the linked site but it is still leaked from your page. Googles answer to page rank sculpting. Do some research and then remove those no follow tags. Worried about spam? akismet does a fine job.
Thank you Dan for your input. I am not against dofollow, but I said, I am against intentional dofollow and nofollow. The links should be natural and the link building strategy should be natural. Google expects a publisher to verify if he passes authority to the linked site.
Anyway, search engines are growing smarter, and the discussion of dofollow and nofollow is going to be obsolete. Google has better algorithms and now less necessity to rely upon the attributes the publisher sets.
Now, the more important thing is relevancy and location of links rather than the linked is colored red or blue or green
I had a plan to move my blog to dofollow blog. I really liked you mentioned the disadvantages of dofollow blogs. Thanks to you I have to think again the pros and cons of it
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And as Sourish said, linking to bad neigbour can lead to ban from Google.
Thanks for the post. I think the dofollow will really help the websites that are just started. In this way they get the required traffic and later on they may decide to make it no follow or they may mature and master how to recognize the spams so they can avoid such comments easily. More over if we used this tool carefully it will be a lethal weapon.
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Thannk you for your comment. After going through many comments, the spams are smelt from a longer distance.