DoFollow Blogs - Good or Bad?

There has been a growing number of dofollow blogs sprouting up the last several months. Is going dofollow with your blog good or bad?

First, what are dofollow blogs?

Dofollow is the opposite of NoFollow. Wordpress blogs, by default, use the HTML nofollow attribute on links that point away from the blog. This nofollow attribute comes into play with the posting of blog comments. The nofollow tag tells the search engines NOT to follow the link to any other web sites.

DoFollow blogs are going against the norm and turning the NoFollow tag off, enabling dofollow of out going comment links. Visitors who comment get a back link in return for a good quality comment.

The theory behind dofollow blogs is to reward people who read your blog posts and provide a good comment with a back link. It's also a good way to build a community as I have found that people who have commented once, often come back to comment again.

The downside to going dofollow on your blog, is comment spam. From experience I can tell you that you will have comment spam even if your blog is nofollow. Wordpress now has great comment anti-spam tools like Askimet and SpamKarma to fight comment spam. With one of the these tools installed, I have found it takes just a few more minutes a day to moderate dofollow comments that are not truly spam, but are not up to my comment standards.

The trade off of taking a few minutes to monitor comments in exchange for more traffic to my blog, with people spending more time on my blog and commenting on my blog is well worth the few worthless comments that I receive.

But,what about traffic? Will dofollow blogs bring more traffic?

Changing your blog to be dofollow will do no good if people don't know about it - you have to let people know that your blog is dofollow.

I do this by clearly stating on my blog that it is a dofollow blog. See the U Comment I Follow graphic on my blog.

I then submit my blogs to dofollow blog directories and dofollow blog lists. Then, I suggest you comment on the dofollow blogs of others to get back links to your blog.

I also suggest you Stumble, Digg and Social Bookmark some of your favorite posts.

By doing all these things you should be able to get a fair amount of traffic. The traffic to my 4 dofollow blogs all increased by going dofollow and applying the above techniques.

So, I strongly suggest you go dofollow if you need some life injected into your blog.

Mike