No Follow Do Follow? I Am Enabling DOFOLLOW on My Blog So You Can Win
The no follow do follow debate is an everlasting one that has gotten some strong arguments from both sides. So should you incorporate nofollow or dofollow tags on your website or blog is the ultimate question?
The right answer is that it depends on your objectives. For me, I have decided that STARTING TODAY, I AM ACTIVATING THE DOFOLLOW TAG ON ALL COMMENT LINKS ON MY BLOG.
What are No Follow Do Follow Tags?
The no follow do follow tags, also written as “nofollow” and “dofollow” are snippets of HTML code that one can incorporate in internal or external links on one’s website or blog. These tags determine whether a website’s page rank is passed on to the site that it is linking to.
Without incorporating these tags, all links are dofollow links by default. In other words, when you link to another website from your own, you are passing on some of your “page rank juice” or credibility to the website you are linking to.
Why is this important? Because search engines consider a website’s page rank a sign of its credibility / reputation and thus deems it a critical component of its determination of where the website should rank amongst its competitors.
Let me explain in simpler English. Have a look at my post on the best domain name for your website. In this post, notice that I have linked to several external websites. Here is an image:
Since these websites are all external websites (not any of my own either), I have decided to incorporate a nofollow tag in my link so that my page rank doesn’t leak out to it. If my page rank leaks out, my website becomes that much weaker and the site I link to becomes that much stronger. Here is how the link looks like with the nofollow tag in it:
<p>For example, if you own the domain name <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.cleancookinghabits.com/” target=”_blank”>www.cleancookinghabits.com</a>, you might also want to get <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.cleancookinghabbits.com/” target=”_blank”>www.cleancookinghabbits.com</a>. Notice the extra “b” in the latter, which is a common misspelling of the word habit. Similarly, if you own <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.shoesforless.com/” target=”_blank”>www.shoesforless.com</a>, you might want to consider getting <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.shoes4less.com/” target=”_blank”>www.shoes4less.com</a>.</p>
In order to do this, go to the HTML code of your website and manually add the nofollow tag (rel=”nofollow”) in the link code as shown in the example above. To make the link a dofollow link, do nothing as links by default are dofollow in nature. In WordPress, simply click over to the HTML tag in the post creation section. Here is how it looks like:
Pros and Cons of Nofollow and Dofollow Tags
You might be thinking why would anyone allow their hard earned page rank to flow out of their website into another one that they don’t own? This is a valid concern, and for the most part savvy internet marketers and bloggers are good about protecting their website’s page rank.
By allowing page rank to leak out, the subject website’s own page rank is deteriorated, which could impact its advertising revenues (advertisers love high page rank websites and pay good money to advertise on them) amongst other things.
Leaving links as dofollow also encourages spam if you are operating a blog. Because “commenters” know that they can benefit from your blog’s page rank, they leave keyword rich comments that they think can benefit the website they link to. So instead of commenting to add value to the discussion, many simply comment to spread their digital footprint and benefit from the “page rank juice flow”. I will show you how I do this below.
So why then would I deliberately convert from nofollow to dofollow on my blog? Not long ago Andrew left a comment on my blog. Here is what he said:
You can read the post and the comment thread here.
He called me out and told me what I am doing is totally not cool. Well, whether or not cool is irrelevant, one should do what they need to do to meet their objectives. In my case, WordPress had the nofollow tag option enabled by default.
When I think about it, while the default option intends to do well by protecting my page rank, it doesn’t provide out of ordinary incentive for readers who are also website owners to leave a comment and interact. I am not saying it discourages them, but enabling the dofollow tag will certainly give them more reason to leave a comment on my blog.
So after putting in some thought into this, I am enabling the dofollow tag on all my blog’s comments here on out TO ENCOURAGE MORE READER PARTICIPATION AND INTERACTION. I am curious to observe how this impacts my page rank in the long term and will continue to observe it.
How to Activate the Dofollow Tag on Comments?
If you read online you will find many articles on how to change your blog from a nofollow to a dofollow by including a snippet of code or a small script in some of your WordPress files. I try to avoid the technical stuff and go for the easier route. Instead of messing around with the code files, a quick way to enable dofollow tags on comments is to use the CommentLuv plugin and change the settings within.
Once you have the CommentLuv plugin installed, scroll down to the bottom of your settings and simply select the option you’d like and update the settings.
Here is a screen shot of what this looks like:
Save your changes and now your comment links are dofollow links. Cheers!
How Can You Take Advantage / What Does This Mean For You?
Here is how YOU can win from the simple change I made to my blog. To make most of your time spent on my blog, leave a comment after reading any given post and gain a dofollow link back to your website or blog.
Please don’t spam me or I will block you forever and hunt you down with my baseball bat. Instead, add value to the community and in turn take value back to your website as fair and mutual exchange.
Here is a commenting tip: To make most of your commenting activity on dofollow blogs like mine is now, incorporate your website’s keyword in your comment title. This is how I do it on other blogs for example:
These are comments I made in response to a guest post I had written on ProBlogger. Notice I have included some keywords in my name. I call these Search Engine Optimized Comments.
This method utilizes your keyword as part of the anchor text that links back to your website or blog and thus helps your search engine ranking for that keyword. In my case, my keyword is “Extra Money Blog”.
Proceed with some level of caution however because spammy keywords often end up in the spam or trash folder. This happens to me quite a bit because my keyword involves the word “money”, which is often used by spammers. Other keywords that are highly suspect are “free” “sex” “viagra” “get laid” . . . you know the drill.
If you get caught in the trash and care enough about the comment you had made, email the blog’s author separately and asked to be fished out of the spam folder. I have done this a ton of times, and others have emailed me just as many times asking to be rescued from my blog’s spam box.
How Does This Relate to Expedited Wealth Building?
If your business is based on an online model, or if you are using a website or blog to support your business, utilizing no follow do follow tags are relevant to your website’s success, which is predicated on the traffic it generates based on its rank on the internet.
By incorporating nofollow tags in external links, you are maximizing your website’s opportunity to rank high for keywords it is optimized for. With a higher rank comes more traffic and thus potentially more revenues for your business.
That said, there are some instances where incorporating the dofollow tag makes sense, such as in my blog’s example where my objective is to encourage more reader participation and interaction.
Now that you know what no follow and do follow tags are and the pros and cons involved in using each, you can make the decision that best supports YOUR overall objectives.
Readers: Will my enabling of the dofollow tag make you comment more often on my blog? I want your opinion on whether to No follow or do follow? Why? Does it even matter? Do you have questions?
You can read Google’s thoughts on the no follow do follow tags here.
Sunil
Dofollow-ing
Next: Buying Real Estate in Your Self Directed Roth IRA to Escape Taxes and Maximize ROI – Pros, Cons and Other Considerations
63 Responses to “No Follow Do Follow? I Am Enabling DOFOLLOW on My Blog So You Can Win”
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I hear so many conflicting opinions about whether it’s better to dofollow or nofollow. I definitely see the advantage in terms of traffic. But I’ve been led to believe it can really drain your site of juice. I think it probably depends on what type of site you have. Some sites require more social interaction to prosper, so I definitely see the benefit of dofollowing comments on those.
You nailed it Lisa. Blog’s certainly are one of those sites that require the interaction. You can get away with it with a niche site. It seems like your conclusions are consistent with the content of this article. What are the conflicts that you have heard?
Welcome to the blog Lisa – looking forward to more interaction.
Kudos to you. I too, enabled dofollow on my website a few weeks back. Losing PR juice in exchange for engagement is a no brainer for me. I’d rather reward my readers for coming back. Besides, what goes around, comes around. I give them some of my PR juice, I am sure, I am going to get some in return, somehow.
Your logic seems sound Jim. Interaction certainly gives your site a whole new meaning / purpose….
Hi Sunil, I struggled with this about six months ago when I finally received a not of PR juice. I’m thankful for commentluv premium and the nofollow tag. I mark affiliate links nofollow and all comments get a dofollow. All non spammy comments. Its a happy medium. 🙂
Welcome to the blog Vanita. I like the way you’ve decided to route PR. I do the same.
A good act indeed Sunil… it seems illogical at first – to pass link juice outside your domain; but the return of getting live engagement and developing a reader base is incomparable to the link juice that one can save by using “no follow”.
At the end of the day, having a healthy community of people helping each other is what matters most.
That is exactly the direction I am attempting to head in. Welcome to the blog – I hope to interact more with you.
Hi Sunil,
Thanks for explaining the nofollow tag in layman’s term. I agree with you 100%.
Especially for a beginning blog, leaving the links as dofollow is better. Too me, the benefits of having an active discussion with your readers is far more important than page rank if it encourages more participation and community building. If I went to a blog that looked dead, there’s a good chance I would not come back.
Seeing an active blog makes me think that its a hip and happening place. Hey, it worked for your blog, I keep coming back 🙂
Jeff
Good to hear Jeff – thanks for the encouragement and the “patronage”. I sound like a neighborhood boutique shop 🙂
I’m a newbie on the field of blogging thank for this tips and for the explanation very well said and I follow it and it serve as a guide to me as I create my blog..Thanks a lot keep posting…
Welcome to the blog Gabriel. Looking forward to getting to know you better.
Hey Sunil, first off, I’ve never left a comment with my name and site name together, so this is first! We’ll see how many times I want to type that out. At least this one is easier than Geoff from the Car Negotiation Coach.
Anyhoo, I remember reading a while back that link juice flows out from a page whether or not a link is no follow or do follow. The no follows just dissolve in the eyes of the Big G and the do follows get passed to the linked page. And google’s main reason for wanting us drones to use no follow is to indicate which sites are paid links or advertisements.
The point I’m making is that removing the no follow tag is a good idea you have and probably won’t hurt you at all (only help you gain more commentors as youmention). Of course this logic could be one the many rumors floating around about google’s algorithms, but there’s also a chance it may have some merit :).
Geoff – you are right in that the intention was to highlight ads vs non. ads as this impacted page rank some years ago. Not sure where that facet of the algo stands today. I can tell you from my niche sites however that pages with 10 outbound links vs. 2 are performing equally as well from PR perspective. Of course I have no follow enabled on all niche sites in most cases.
As far as using a relevant anchor text in a do follow link, it will help your website gain traction for that particular phrase.
I use WordPress standard setup for this, but I also have a “do-follow” section for the top commentators 🙂
Kevin – how are you able to configure this in a WP standard set-up? Would love to hear more…
I use the “Top Commentators Widget”. It lets you put a widget on the sidebar for the top commentators and you can also make it do-follow.
I did use commentLuv in the past but I uninstalled it since it completely messed up my RSS feed…
I hear you on CL – too many kinks, but the frequent updates seem to fix most of them. I have considered using Top Commentators before – will revisit the plugin.
I used ComLuv for a year, but then it just stopped working. I contacted the developer, tried different things and it just didn’t work so I took it off.
Good job encouraging conversation!
I did notice CL gone from your site. What were the kinks? They have improved it significantly from when it first came out, still not perfect however.
I have been toying with the premium version and will write a review on it if I find it’s beneficial. Thanks Sam.
Enjoyed your article on No Follow/Do Follow. I am not into internet marketing; but, merely looking for ways to popularize my new site on anxiety attacks. You have provided me some very helpful tips through the use of Do Follow. Thank you 🙂
Ellie
You are welcome Ellie and welcome to the blog. What’s your website’s URL? Would love to have a look.
Sunil, As far as I know, it is common convention for comments to be no follow. In my opinion, if my comments are do follow, I want to thank you. You are giving me an opportunity to grow my site. And of course, I would tend to comment more.
You are absolutely correct Barbara, and yes that’s the idea, a mutually beneficial relationship here is the driver of the initiative.
I’ve been thinking about making my blog do-follow but I’m worried about the amount of spam I’ll get.
Plus, I’m still debating if I should use a plugin that requires the commenter to leave X comments before s/he gets a do-follow link.
Welcome to the blog Waldemar.
Go right ahead buddy. All you need is the “Akismet” and “confirm you are not a spammer” plugins. I have cut down spam to at most 5 a day.
Nooo…. I have to disagree with this. If you go down this path make sure you have a contact form that works and is not also protected by Akismet! Otherwise, you run the risk of throwing perfectly legitimate commentators into the spam. Akismet has far too high of a false-positive rate.
If you use Akismet I highly recommend you also use “Conditional Captcha” to fix the false positive problem while still tossing spammers, and only showing a captcha to those in purgatory.
Kevin – can you point me to some literature on this topic?
Prior to the additional “confirm not spammer” plugin, I was only running Akismet. Some legitimates fell through the cracks (the false positives you refer to) which I manually edited, but those legitimates will still show in my “trash” / “spam” folder today if one was to leave a comment and click the confirm box (and get thrown in spam jail for whatever reason).
The combination of Akismet and this additional plugin ensures that all the auto comments (the true spam) is eliminated, while the legitimate comments either appear in my moderation or trash queue, which I can still moderate and bring back to life. What am I missing?
Nice post on the attributes of do- vs. no-follow. I use commentluv, with no issues. I’ve enabled for registered members, and I assume they are the ones who have been “approved”
Glad to hear Andrew. I personally find Commentluv clunky and problematic from a compatibility standpoint (hence an update every few days it seems like). It is the only option of its kind currently however.
Hi,
I would like to ask if a nofollow tag is best suited for a non-blog website like mine. I think I have this tag ever since. or should I change it to dofollow too?
Nice article by the way,
Jintu
Welcome to the blog Jintu. If you have a site/blog that is static and non interactive in nature, I’d personally add the nofollow attribute to all my outgoing links. Why lose the linkjuice?
I am a bit confused. I thought the way it worked now is that linkjuice was deleted if not used, so that this sort of “sculpting” didn’t work any more.
Kevin what do you mean by “not used”? As far I know default links with no nofollow tag still leak out page rank from the specific page they are on. Any literature you can point me toward?
Thank you Sunil,
Now I remember why I put a nofollow tag on my pages. LoL. I have changed it recently to dofollow, my bad 🙂
Thanks once again for the great advise.
Jintu
I have been surfing on-line greater than 3 hours lately, but I by no means discovered any interesting article like yours. It is beautiful price enough for me. In my opinion, if all webmasters and bloggers made just right content material as you probably did, the internet will probably be much more helpful than ever before.
kind words Ambien, much appreciated
Very well written post. It will be beneficial to everyone who employees it, including me. Keep up the good work – i will definitely read more posts.
thanks James and welcome. let me know if there are particular topics you’d like to read more about
Sunil, I’ve been bookmarking quite a bit of your content. Your “actionable tips” are exceptional. Have you studied your metrics comparing no follow with do follow yet? How have they worked out?
Best regards, Barbara Friedberg
Barb good to see you after a while. I think the follow/dofollow study just got buried in my to do list. I will have to revisit that. what is it that you’re interested in? if you are asking about subscriber count, yes it has definitely shot up since I have enabled do follow. how is the book coming along?
Re the booK about “Personal Finance for Gen Y” I’ve had a ton of drama over it’s publication. TMI for a short comment spot. In sum, I have a solid possibility of a publisher at present!
I am following in your footsteps and will be creating some extremely specific ebooks very soon related to investing and finance as well!!!
Oh, one last question, how do your readers know that your comments are “dofollow” ?
excellent news Barb. they don’t unless the view my source code. there are also websites where they can input the URL of my blog and determine. it’s not realistic for me to hope they see this post 🙂 keep me posted with your progress. always interested in knowledge sharing.
Great blog Sunil! I wanted to say that another way people can determine if your blog is dofollow is by an addon to Firefox called “NoDoFollow.” I used this tool to find your blog.
I also wanted to ask if it was intentional that you made your text that you comment with white against that tan background. I had to highlight your comments to read what you wrote more easily. Keep up the great blogging and thank you for using dofollow. It not only helps you but helps the internet community as well.
welcome to the blog Greg. good question. certainly not by design. I am going through a design change and the developer has run into some glitches with the css. will fix it shortly.
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targeted audience. Many companies make the mistake of sending generic un-interesting emails to mass
list of email address.
Thanks for your post Sunil. I had been contemplating making my blog comments do follow but I wanted to find out the reason why everybody made them no follow first. Your article is the first and only article I’ve read which explains the ‘why’ in a manner I can understand.
And thanks for the commenting tip of putting your blog name after your name. This is the first time I’ve tried this.
you’re welcome Angel. depending on everyone’s own preferences, you may or may not enable this option. newer blog designs are moving toward a defacto no follow however. if/when I update the blog theme, I am sure this will apply to EMB as well
I never thought about using my site name in my title section.
It certainly seems like an eye-catching idea though.
As for the nofollow, dofollow argument, I believe that rewarding regular visitors/commentors would be the best way to go, especially if you’re openly advertising a dofollow blog.
It will help quell the spam and shallow commentators by forcing a “we dofollow only if….” either forcing spammers and shallow people to do some real leg work to get a shot, possibly helping you in the process anyway
I see that you have already tried incorporating your title in your name Daniel 🙂
I only started doing that after reading this blog.
Hi sunil,
Your post is well written and also help me to know concept of do follow and no follow and advantage and disadvantage of them on your website page ranking thanks pal clearing me out my confusion on that topic
I’m considering doing the same on my blogs (changing to dofollow comments). I’m curious to see an update on the positives and negatives after implementing this change.
What plugin do you use to keep spam under control? Have you lost any PageRank?
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Kevin, I have not lost PR. I have basic plugins like Akismet and the confirm box you see in the comment section. I do get some spam, but relatively less when I speak to others in the popular space
Hi Sunil!
I’m planning to do what you did. Blog participation is rewarding, I value readership more.
I’ve got a question though, sorry I’m a newbie in blogging, did you make your blog a “dofollow” ? Or just the comments? Hope you’ll pardon my ignorance regarding this. More power!
Jeni
The blog as a whole is dofollow. There are plugins available however through which you can make certain links nofollow. For example, when linking out to other sites, many publishers would enable the nofollow tag. Hope that helps
as par my knowledge Dofollow Link is a hyperlink that is able to tell all search engines to pass along it’s page rank influence to an outbound link.
Nice article 🙂
Thanks for explaining the nofollow tag in layman’s term. I agree with you 100%.
Thank you for all the helpful tips and information! I am going back to enabling comments on my site and will take your suggestions into consideration.
If you could gve me a gist of this article,how would you do it ?
So I’m confused a little you do want do follow link to Point to your site. but if you have other webpages that you own you don’t want the links to affect you ranking. I have a Lotta of reading to do. Any good 101 classes you guys recommend
This is probably one of the better posts I’ve seen on this. I too have commentluv, but I was torn about whether or not I should make it dofollow. I’ll give it a try and see what happens. Thanks for explaining this.