From Nofollow to Dofollow
While there’s an ever increasing trend by worried webmasters resulting in more and more sites nofollowing all external links, it’s not necessarily necessary, or even beneficial, and probably won’t help your rankings anyway.
So, I’ve now removed the nofollow tags from the external links on my site, including blog comments, as hyperlinks are an integral part of the web. As I have a WordPress blog I used the NoFollow Free WordPress plugin, as it has some handy features and saved me the time I’d otherwise have spent hacking my installation.
Of course, I may have to reconsider this policy if inundated with spam, and will be more selective than even about which comments to allow, but rather than be cynical, I thought that I’d give it a go.
I also recently read a great article on dofollowing blogs and how (and why) to write worthwhile comments.
Dofollow blog commenting netiquette vs a barbecue party
Cheers SEO 2.0!
For a moment I thought a new “dofollow” tag was being introduced, haha.
Let me be the second to comment in your new dofollow comment box.
Cheers.
and nice work on the dofollow.
[...] can view my SEO blog [...]
I just don’t understand why google would need to do that. really, is there any point? I have read elsewhere that it still passes PR juice around? Anybody have an answer?
I have done exactly the same thing to my site
I hope you can handle the frustrating spam, it really gets nasty sometimes on wordpress blogs with all those porn comments!
Thanks for the short but concise post. Great job
But I found this page is still using nofollow tags
Spam wasn’t such an issue when we started out, the first priorities being to find a free, inoffensive template (trickier than it sounds), post some quality content and see whether anybody read our posts.
Now that we are gaining popularity spammers are catching on to us too and so we are re-evaluating our nofollow policy as we go.
Hyperlinks from our own posts are still generally dofollow and we’d like to disable nofollows for trusted comments (not just all those approved), however, I’m not sure whether that’s possible with our current WordPress plugins.
If you know of a good one, please let us know.
Incidentally, Askimet does a reasonably good job, however, I just had to trawl through several hundred spam comments in order to rescue two genuine ones and so, however good, it’s not yet perfect.
At the time of writing we had caught 7,018 spam comments and approved 67 in total, which is already a 100:1 ratio and some of that 1% were our own.
Good content. Just wanted to add some points here that may be helpful for those looking out for professional SEO services. There are tons of SEO companies offering different SEO packages and solutions at highly competitive rates. However, when looking our for these services, its important to not only look at the affordability factor but also what is unique about their SEO service and what differentiates them from other companies.
While choosing an SEO company its equally important to analyze the SEO company’s website in terms of their Rankings, Yahoo links, Google index, Alexa ranking and similar such factors which indicates the company’s expertise in the field of SEO. So make sure you are doing enough research and smart work before investing your advertising spend.
I agree up to a point, although newer, smaller companies are always going to have fewer links and lower rankings due to limited time and resources, even if their content is just as authoritative. Also, it’s been a while since I heard anybody mention Alexa in the same breath as SEO.
Good on you, Anthony. In my mind, all software should be dofollow by default. Not the other way around. Share the google love!