If you comment on do follow blogs for back links, read this!

[nebraska]

I've always commented on do follow blogs. 1. I like commenting and being part of the discussion, and 2. It's always been a good way to build backlinks that matter. The do follow movement is something that came about a few years ago and is a credible and admirable endeavour for those that practice it. They make a concerted effort to handle more comments, (the inevitable result as more people will find them via do follow search engines) and also they lose a portion of their page rank because of do following all those comments.

I was doing some do follow searching the other day and noticed that the DF search scene has changed as well. Jerry's is gone...(bummer) and the others that I found either were looking to make a buck off it, or didn't work very well. I did manage to find a couple that still worked the way I wanted, ie., within a custom google search so Seo Quake will feed me back the information I wanted.

I mention Seo Quake because it's important to this post. See, SQ has a feature that if you check it off, will analyse the page you're on and place a strike through on any link that is being no followed. In other words, all no follow links have a line through them.

While visiting some of these "do follow" blogs, I immediately noticed that a lot of them had strike through's on all their comment headers, and links as well. It didn't take long for me to realize they weren't do follow blogs at all and were no following their comments. Hey, no problem if you're wanting to no follow your comments, but it's highly unethical to get yourself listed in do follow directories and search, and secretly apply the no follow attribute to your comments.

If you're looking to do some blog commenting on do follow blogs, then maybe run Seo Quake, and activate the "Line Through No Follow No Index" feature, before you do and blow off the ones that have set their blog to no follow comments.

If you're someone who's deliberately listing yourself in the do follow community, but actually no following for your own benefit, (and for the record, getting comments on your blog en masse is a tremendous benefit and do follow blogs usually get a lot of comments) then you are what's wrong with this business and you need to go away.

[rtrotter]

Excellent post, thanks. Some time back I wrote a script that did Google search of blogs based on input keyword and then read the page comments checking for nofollow. The number that come up as do follow is really small.

A good WP plugin to protect your blog from comment bots is Bad Behavior. That combined with a captsha will keep a lot of comment spammers out and make it easier to make links do followed.

Rodney

[AnneE]

Thanks for the pointer to SEO Quake. I've been looking for a quick way to distinguish whether a link was followed or not. Someone else had commented that you could look at a link's properties via a right mouse click and see if it was nofollow or not... but I don't see this indicated.

I was wondering if a link has rel='external' within it's anchor tag -- is that related to following or not?

I also think that a lot of listings of websites and blogs that are dofollow are quickly becoming out of date as owners become tired of policing SPAM and just give up and convert to nofollow. Again... which gives rise to the need to be able to determine the current policy quickly.

[affiliated survivor]

Don´t expect these do follow directories to be accurate. I don´t know if these blogs listed themselves there but these list may be quite old and a lot has changed since they had there last update.

[hommi_16]

Originally Posted by affiliated survivor

Don´t expect these do follow directories to be accurate. I don´t know if these blogs listed themselves there but these list may be quite old and a lot has changed since they had there last update.

Most blogs won't advertise that they are do follow. The problem is that they webmasters create a list of dofollow blogs and the blogs retaliate due to the amount of spam they end up receiving when they become a part of this list.

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by AnneE

I also think that a lot of listings of websites and blogs that are dofollow are quickly becoming out of date as owners become tired of policing SPAM and just give up and convert to nofollow.

This is true. A lot of people have done this. I've just about given up on this myself due to the heavy "Great Post" auto-spamming I get.

[nebraska]

Actually, if you're willing to do a few extra steps, you could just do a normal Google blog search, use SQ to sort the higher PR blogs and their pages, and visit them. The one's without strike through will be do follow and then you could contribute to them and get a link.

Take the the SE's that aren't updated out of the picture and in all reality, commenting on a no follow blog doesn't hurt really...and if you choose high PR blogs, there might be some benefits, as well as networking with some popular sites and their targeted readers.

[sarafina]

What do you guys mean by 'strike throughs' ?

[nebraska]

Originally Posted by sarafina

What do you guys mean by 'strike throughs' ?

The link will have a line through it. It's thin, but noticeable. Lets you know the link is no follow.

[AnneE]

Originally Posted by nebraska

....

If you're looking to do some blog commenting on do follow blogs, then maybe run Seo Quake, and activate the "Line Through No Follow No Index" feature, before you do and blow off the ones that have set their blog to no follow comments.

I installed the SEO Quake Firefox plugin, but I'm having trouble finding this feature. Any pointers/details would be appreciated. Sorry if I'm being dense.

P.S. It looks like in banging on my keyboard that I managed to turn it on. It's interesting, there are actually some internal links within Squidoo that are nofollow that I had always assumed were follow, such as a Table of Contents (I can't imagine their motivation for making any internal links nofollow).

One thing I do see is that there are some websites where javascript will show up highlighted as though they were dofollow links, but they do not actually appear in the view source of the HTML... so for those, it is misleading looking at the highlighting. My highlighting came up with nofollow in RED... hard to miss. But if you know how you turn this feature on and off... still post because I have no idea how I turned it on.

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by AnneE

I installed the SEO Quake Firefox plugin, but I'm having trouble finding this feature. Any pointers/details would be appreciated. Sorry if I'm being dense.

Left side of the toolbar you'll see the small 'SQ' button with a dropdown arrow. On the menu, check "Line through 'nofollow' and 'noindex'" and you're set.

[nebraska]

or if you installed the non tool bar version, there's a little badge in the bottom right of your browser taskbar. Click it turn it off and on. Right click it to pull up the settings menu. Line Through No Follow No Index is an option from right clicking.

There's also more options by just right clicking the page you're on.

[warf]

Wouldn't it just be easier to right click on a user in the comments and see if the link is nofollow? or if there is a link in any of the comments made by the commenter to see if the link is nofollow?