by Ana Hoffman 84 comments

DoFollow vs NoFollow Update: Where Do We Stand?



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blogging changes traffic generation cafe

Welcome change...

I‘ve been making a lot of changes to Traffic Generation Cafe lately – mostly behind the scenes.

You may or may not have noticed, but I think it’s important to share what it is I’ve been doing around here, for what purpose, and whether it’s something you might consider doing on your blog as well.

So here are some of the most notable ones:

Quality vs Quantity

Last week, I wrote about what turned out to be a bit controversial topic – reducing the size of your site and thus improving its rankings by deleting or updating some of the irrelevant, outdated, low-link low-traffic content.

Read the full article here:

Well, I’ve done even more research on the topic and still stick with my initial conclusions: leaner, more quality-oriented site will do much better in search engines than a bigger over-bloated site with lots of low-quality “filler” pages.

The culprit behind all this is a Google ranking update called “Mayday Update”, rolled out a year ago where

“…pages that don’t have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them.” (Source)

Yes, they are mostly talking about much bigger sites and even more precisely commercial sites, but tying it with the my post above, where Google advises to delete pages with useless outdated content, I am convinced that’s the way to go.

So for the past week, I’ve been doing a lot of spring cleaning around here, getting rid of my Christmas messages, news that are no longer news, and rewriting content that it is still relevant, but could use an update.

Will you see those changes? Probably not.

Will Google? I do hope so.

One more thing I did regarding quantity vs quality of pages: I got rid of my commenting plugin I’ve been using for a long time now called SEO Super Comments.

SEO Super Comments

In short, this plugin generated dynamic pages for each commentator and collected all the DoFollow link juice on those pages, thus providing only one higher quality link back to your site and saving me some link juice in the process.

Read more about the way it used to work around here:

I still believe that the plugin is a great answer for those sites who would like to remain DoFollow, yet don’t want to give away all their link juice, BUT FOR the fact that it does produce thousands of dynamic pages that are not what we and Google would call “quality”.

Some of those page on my site are actually ranking for keywords, believe it or not, but usually not the type I would add to my chosen keyword list:

search engine ranking for useless keywords

(this screenshot is from SEMRush – highly recommended tool for anyone wanting to rank higher on Google.)

See what I mean? Plus, I was ranking for some of my commentators’ names – not sure how you feel about that. :)

So away with SEO Super Comments.

NoFollow Free

Welcome NoFollow Free – the plugin that allows me to grant DoFollow links to commentators with 3 or more comments behind their belts.

Mind you that 3 comments rule applies to commentators who use the same name, website, and email on a consistent basis.

If you like to vary your anchor text for instance, as well as you should, you would need to collect 3 comments with THAT anchor text for your link to become DoFollow.

Protects me and still gives you a chance to collect a bunch of DoFollow links from my site – you just have to work at it a bit harder.

KeywordLuv Is Back

Now that I’ve changed my entire commenting system, it only makes sense to bring back KeywordLuv and let you, my dear readers, have your desired anchor text links going back to your site, while still not looking like a spammer and using your first name in the comment section.

Don’t forget: use “yourname @ yourkeyword” for it to work (you can also get rid of spaces there as well).

Notice I said “keyword” singular – please don’t add a multitude of them, hoping your comment will get approved.

Marketing Takeaway

As you see, some of these changes are reader-oriented, some are Google-oriented, but I hope that overall they’ll make everyone happy.

Image credit: http://vijaycool.wordpress.com/

Love it or hate it? Comment to show me that you’re alive!

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Google+ Comments

{ 84 comments }

Mary April 17, 2012 at 8:49 am

Ana, I’m not seeing that any of the commenter’s links on your blog are follow links. For example none of the links in this thread of comments are follow links. Am I missing something in blog newbie fashion, or what?

Ana Hoffman April 19, 2012 at 8:21 am

Actually, my current settings are nofollow on CL links and dofollow on the name links.

Christi Johnson January 13, 2012 at 6:57 pm

Ana…are you still using KeywordLuv? Or is CommentLuv Premium basically KeywordLuv now? I have been trying my hardest to find it in my WP admin…to no avail. Great post, by the way. I have to admit, there’s WAY too much to choose from right now… :(

Also…are you still using NoFollow Free to moderate? It sounds like a great tool, but I wonder if new sites should use it. We’re only a little over a month old. Thanks for all you do!

Christi Johnson January 18, 2012 at 10:19 am

That’s exactly what I am doing now. Once I get the kind of traffic I want, I may very well model your process if yours is still the same at that time. Thanks. :)

Tracy November 29, 2011 at 5:59 pm

Hi Ana,

I agree with your theory: give a dofollow link but make people work for it a little bit. Then both parties are happy! Thanks to Ileane for sending me over this way-yet again!

Tracy

Ana Hoffman November 29, 2011 at 7:03 pm

Always love seeing you here, Tracy.

Aniket October 30, 2011 at 6:38 am

Hey, Nice post again.
But I’ll agree with Barrie here – “A link is a link & they all serve a purpose.”

I have always considered CONTENT as being of the highest importance.
If you have a great content & a strategic approach while publishing it, it will rank higher anyways in google.

I mean – creating a new content & having it referenced with a catchy relevant title (ie Anchor text). Ofcourse, in our case, its a link.
Dofollow/Nofollow doesnt matter. I believe, if google likes it & finds it relevant enough, its going to rank you high.

Its true. You dont have to run always for pagerank & go for dofollow links.
Create the best content for a certain topic with keywords in mind.
Publish the content & have it linked (even nofollow link is beneficial).
Just have google index it. If its good enough, google will even rank you high for your keyword.
PageRank will follow in time…!!

I do have a proof for it. Havent reached 1st SERP yet.
But had a page uploaded. When it was indexed, it was on the 6th SERP for my given keyword (directly with just 3 backlinks) & now after nearly 4 weeks its on 2nd SERP in Google. Content matters.
Hopin for the best. :)

Ana Hoffman October 30, 2011 at 3:06 pm

Of course, content matters, but more to readers than to Google.

Content by itself won’t rank most of the times; always needs a little help from link building.

Aniket October 31, 2011 at 7:08 am

Surely link building matters.
I have just started with SEO since 7-8weeks. I have read many articles over the net. All of them did give a considerable amount of importance to backlinking. :)

But my recent observations show otherwise.
Not an expert & have no solid support for this but it feels that google isnt giving much of importance to backlinks these days.

Hmmm… Surely, I cant give a guarantee for anything until I reach 1st SERP. So time will tell.
SEO surely is uncertain. :P

Eddie Gear October 29, 2011 at 9:51 pm

Hi Ana,

This is great. I am going to make some changes in terms of comments on my blog as well. Gotta install KeywordLuv and No follow free.

Anne Lyken-Garner October 6, 2011 at 3:14 am

Well, I don’t think I’ve been to this site before (so no link juice for me). I was reading about the new comluv plugin on Lleane’s site and followed a link here. Thanks for this article. It has lots of new information for me.

Ana Hoffman October 6, 2011 at 2:10 pm

You are very welcome, Anne, and welcome to Traffic Generation Cafe!

Mitchell Allen September 5, 2011 at 8:35 am

I was just telling Ileane that I never gave this topic much thought. (She linked here, so I decided to give it soome thought, LOL).

SEO has always been a low priority for me, even though I’ve seen what an SEO-crafted post gets by way of search engine traffic. The simple reason for this nonchalance is that my blog is a personal collection of stuff. I’m happy if anybody visits at all – except those crusty spammers.

Still, I study what you and several other savvy teachers share with us. And I do appreciate learning what works, and why.

Cheers,

Mitch

Ana Hoffman September 6, 2011 at 3:55 am

Ileane is an expert and a great friend. You’re not too bad yourself! ;-)

Ana July 28, 2011 at 9:20 pm

When I first started, I posted it everywhere I could that I had a dofollow blog. I think it definitely helps, but even with that, it still takes time to prove to your readers you are worth a comment.

By the way, did you see this post yet: http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/drive-traffic-commenting-tribe/ – this strategy helped me a lot when I first started.

zamahsari June 25, 2011 at 8:23 pm

My question: which one to choose: do follow links from unrelated pages or nofollow links from related posts?

Ana June 27, 2011 at 8:08 am

No easy answer here, plus why do you have to choose?

You need both dofollow and nofollow links to rank, and it’s definitely preferred that they come from a relevant website, which for the most part is not that difficult to do, unless you are in a niche market, like you are looks like…

So if the relevancy factor is the difficult one, then forget about it, but you definitely need both types of links.

Josh May 27, 2011 at 7:37 pm

Many discussed that their choice depends on what you’re after too. If you want to do it because of SEO, it’s important to consider dofollow than nofollow. Otherwise, you can also consider both.

Ana May 28, 2011 at 2:27 am

That’s correct, Josh. Obviously your goal will affect your choice.

Katrina Moody May 25, 2011 at 5:21 am

Ana – this is one of the first posts I have seen that really goes into the do not follow and do follow information so clearly. But me? I’m a real newbie to this world of linking and back linking and I really need a great place to start in order to understand the different nuances of this–from a writer and commenter’s standpoint and as a site owner’s standpoint.
Can you recommend me some good links to start with for reading, either here or elsewhere, that could help me understand this area of SEO?

Ana May 26, 2011 at 1:15 pm

No problem at all, Katrina.

I would start here:

http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/dofollow-blog-traffic/
http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/does-nofollow-follow/

Let me know if you have any questions!

Ana

Bruce May 23, 2011 at 7:16 pm

What criteria do you use to determine the under performing pages you’re considering removing?

(If it’s purely on visitors, or lack of, my whole blog may be in for the axe!)

Dave Lucas May 23, 2011 at 11:27 am

Seems like no matter what we do, we must then un-do, and re-do. I guess the same holds true for comments. My head is still spinning… LOL, maybe?

Ana May 24, 2011 at 4:09 am

I like to use the word “fine-tune” :-)

Tim & Sole May 23, 2011 at 10:05 am

Hi Ana!

Here we are again visiting your blog, which we love! We are working on making our blog dofollow…. but we’ve been reading so much information about it that our head is spinning, ;)

So we’re looking for some guidance on the subject… what are all the plugins we need in order to have a perfect dofollow blog, apart from “NoFollow Free”, CommentLuv and KeywordLuv? Any tips will be highly appreciated!

Thanks!!!

Ana May 24, 2011 at 5:43 pm

Always a pleasure to see on here, Tim and Sole!

The only other plugin you need is called simply “DoFollow”. Then all your links on your blog will become DoFollow and if there are some links, like affiliate banners, etc., that you need to keep NoFollow, you just add rel=”nofollow” element to those links by hand.

DoFollow is a great way to go, especially for a newer blog. :)

Tim & Sole June 2, 2011 at 4:02 pm

Ana!

Thanks so much for your reply and guidance! Our blog is DoFollow now. Now we’ve got to remember to add the code for the nofollow affiliate links.

Thanks so much again for your help!

Francis May 23, 2011 at 3:55 am

I have been reading your blog for a while from work and I so much like your ton of writing-very simple. Changes in Google have made it so hard to fully webmaster and ‘SEO’ a website. A lot of updates have been put in place by the big ‘G’ which I believe are to make the search engine a better place – weed out irrelevancy and spam from SERPs.

What you said in this blog is absolutely right. You are a blog genius Ana! There was a comment on Google webmaster last week. It was saying to forget about gaining ranking and enumerated points to ask yourself if you would like to build a web site that could stand for decade.

I am an SEO. I like quality not quantity. You have assembled a lot of useful posts with killer headlines. Guest what? It’s high time you got your reward.

Keep up with this good work.

Regards,
Francis

Ana May 24, 2011 at 3:48 am

What a nice post, thanks Francis! I agree that the chances are in place to improve things all round, we just don’t like the fact that it makes life harder for us. Thank you for stopping by.

Andy Britnell Blogging Coach May 23, 2011 at 3:09 am

I love the way you are creating an online community for bloggers, sharing your knowledge freely and giving back to those who get involved.

It always annoys me that big businesses reward new customers only with freebies and offers and neglect loyal customers (who by the way provide them with probably all their profit!)

So your new system of rewarding loyal blog commenters is a great idea. And that is just a fraction of the generosity that I am finding on your site.

Thank you Ana for shining some light on really useful information that others might prefer to keep to themselves.

Best wishes

Andy

Ana May 23, 2011 at 7:36 am

Thanks for visiting and leaving such a nice comment, Andy. I do enjoy to give value to loyal commenters and appreciate their loyalty in return.

Peter Fuller MBA May 20, 2011 at 10:44 am

Hey Anna, glad to see the changes

I never really liked that Super thingy :)

I like to keep things simple. On my blog first time commenters have to be approved but after that I trust them. Plus I use CommmentLuv to give them a dofollow link back.

I like the idea of the Nofollow Free plugin though.

Peter

Ana May 20, 2011 at 5:57 pm

Thanks, Peter; I love it too!

It’s just that I was getting too many link builders around – this keeps them away.

Good to see you around here, my dear. :)

Ana May 20, 2011 at 2:10 am

Yes, that’s my view anyway. Glad that you trust me on that and thanks for popping by. I always appreciate hearing from you.

James Foster May 20, 2011 at 1:19 am

Its always good to have a precise good quality package with quality content than low quality content because that will reduce your bounce rate. We all know that we all don’t just need traffic, we have got to convert that into clicks.

Ana May 20, 2011 at 2:01 am

I could not agree more! Thanks for stopping by.

James Foster May 22, 2011 at 11:22 pm

Its always nice to see fellow bloggers replying to your comment, indeed gives a feel that commentors have got an audience. Thanks!

Ana May 23, 2011 at 7:49 am

It’s one of my golden rules – I try really hard to never miss a comment.

Ana May 19, 2011 at 1:08 pm

It makes sense when you get a LOT of comments and many of them are purely for link building, Joana – it’s easy to tell.

For the websites that rely heavily on search engine traffic having too many DoFollow links is a big deal, trust me.

Look forward to seeing you back soon!

Ana

Justin Germino May 19, 2011 at 12:41 pm

I have been using NoFollowFree (NoFF) for over a year now and I agree that rewarding your commenters with dofollow after they have become regular stable commenters was better than giving dofollow to every passerby leaving a comment. There were only so many “billy@lose lose weight fast” or “sally@San Fransisco Lawyers” comments I could tolerate. You can tell who deliberately is using the KeyWordLuv and who comments because they care more about the article than the link they get from it.

Ana May 20, 2011 at 2:06 am

I know exactly what you mean and that is why I am doing it this way. Instead of learning from the blog, they care more about just promoting their stuff.

Ana May 20, 2011 at 11:25 am

So I installed your comment policy on my blog, Justin, as you can see. And of course I still get keywords.

Do you just mercilessly delete those kind of comments even if they have some good thoughts in them? Would love to know how you deal with those kinds of comments.

Justin Germino May 20, 2011 at 12:03 pm

Nah, sometimes I just use Ajax Edit Comments and “Unlink” them so the comment sticks but they lose the URL link :0) Other times, if they left a good comment and I see their email has a name in it, I will change to name@theirkeywords for them. Other times I will approve comment and reply to it telling them next time to use proper name@keyword format, because the replyme plugin sends them an email I know they can see my response and maybe get educated.

So depends on the mood I am in, type of comment and honestly what site or keywords targeted. I will likely never approve a divorce attorney keyword on my tech blog, but if it is an iPhone App keyword I may.

Ana May 20, 2011 at 5:54 pm

That makes sense; thanks, Justin!

Ileane May 19, 2011 at 12:16 pm

Hi Ana! I’m really glad to hear your decision about SEO Super Comments. I knew I didn’t like it but never imagined that it would send unwanted traffic from search that way. I think we should get Andrew R. over here and see if he’s getting traffic that way too.

The most important lesson is to try something for awhile and if it doesn’t work – or if you get unexpected outcomes – get rid of it!

Thanks Ana!

Ileane May 19, 2011 at 12:18 pm

I just realized that you got rid of Facebook comments too :)

Ana May 20, 2011 at 2:08 am

I agree with you – I am happy to try new things, but I am not going to let it bring unwanted visitors. Told you there’s a lot of “behind the scenes stuff” happening :-)

Sheila Atwood May 19, 2011 at 8:37 am

Ana,

This does look like a happy solution. I do like rewarding commenters and yet have control of out going links.

Ana May 20, 2011 at 2:16 am

Me too. This is really the best way to do that.

Emil A. Georgiev May 19, 2011 at 7:25 am

Ana,

thanks for sharing your experience with your readers!

In an attempt to encourage the visitors of the Reguligence Weblog to leave more comments, I decided to turn it into a do-follow blog and this fact is announced to any unique new visitor.
I use a WP do-follow plugin and the question is – is going do-follow a necessary “giving” to the blogosphere and, if yes, why has WP a no-follow setting by default? .

BR,
Emil

Ana May 20, 2011 at 11:12 am

I am personally a big fan of DoFollow, Emil.

Why? Because I love SEO and know how much value DoFollow brings to my visitors. And they know it as well.

DoFollow also encourages dialogue – whatever the reason behind it.

I’d say that DoFollow definitely brings in more traffic, more comments (yes, more spam as well :) ), and more of a sense of community.

Why is WP NoFollow by default? Who knows… Probably, because they want their sites to rank higher in Google as well. There’s always competition between different blogging platforms and NoFollow definitely helps to keep the juice in…

But we, bloggers, don’t need authority and PageRank; we need steady traffic and readership that we can monetize and Dofollow works better for that.

Hope this helps.

Ana

Paul Salmon May 19, 2011 at 6:16 am

I used the NoFollow Free plugin a few years ago, and have been thinking about reinstalling and using that plugin again. It worked nicely, and rewarding repeat commenters is a great thing.

As for nofollow/dofollow, I really don’t have an opinion either way. I think about links when writing posts – such as making affiliate links nofollow – but don’t think about how other blogs use the nofollow tag in their comments. It is a debate that will probably never stop, and everyone will have their own opinion either way.

Ana May 20, 2011 at 11:06 am

You are so right, Paul – in the end, we need both Do and Nofollow links for better search engine rankings, so we should stop debating the pros and cons and just take things for what they are.

Ana

Sire May 19, 2011 at 5:28 am

Hi Ana, I can understand how google can find when you do a new post but I’m not sure that their algorithm allows for keeping track of when people delete their posts. What happens when people come via a search engine looking for a particular post only to find it no longer exists?

As for dofollow nofollow, I will remain a dofollow blog.

Ana May 20, 2011 at 11:23 am

I would never delete a blog post that is bringing me traffic from the search engines, Sire – only the ones that don’t at all, or bring irrelevant traffic like I showed above.

I could care less if Dead or Alive fans can’t find my post any longer. Actually, I didn’t delete that post because there’s still a lot of value in it, just removed anything reminding of that song from it. This way it should loose the rankings for the song pretty quickly.

I am with you: I am not changing DoFollow status.

Maky May 19, 2011 at 4:32 am

Hey Ana,

Now you are talking! I’m with you on doing away with SEO super comments.

I used to think that the extra page it generates for each comment is beneficial to the blog owner (as in more indexed pages). But on second thought, I see that for a post with 20 comments, you have 20 redundant pages of comments generated and all I can say is Ouch! Google sure won’t like that.

Thanks for the DoFollow links you give to repeat commenters on your site. You don’t have to, yet u did it. I know that bloggers in the internet marketing etc niche will love it. As long as you keep writing posts that light up enough fire in me to comment, I will keep commenting. I don’t care about DoFollow and NoFollow because even though nofollow does not pass link juice, the search engines will still follow it to my site and that’s all that matters. And good thing is that in my niche, we don’t fret so much about PR and all those ranking thingies ‘blawgers’ lose sleep over :) With the exception of SERPs ranking though!

I am sure you feel good after the house keeping. Congrats on the clean up, welldone!

Ana May 20, 2011 at 11:19 am

Thanks so much, Maky – for compliment of your loyal readership. Always love seeing your back.

You know what bothers me the most when it comes down to Do/Nofollow? It’s when bloggers start as DoFollow and then close the shop down once the commentators built up their blog.

Sure they are free to do so, but leaves sour taste in my mouth.

Ana

Riya May 19, 2011 at 3:13 am

Great point here Ana, Using your old and low quality content again in a better way is always great. It really helps your blog to get more attention of Google plus Vistiors as well.

Ana May 19, 2011 at 5:28 am

It sure does. Thanks for visiting, Riya!

Kristi Hines May 18, 2011 at 11:20 pm

Seems like a good balance for everyone involved! :)

Ana May 19, 2011 at 1:40 am

Absolutely, Kristy. :-)

Jonathan May 18, 2011 at 9:41 pm

Hola,

Tonight it is hola and not hello because I find myself randomly wishing I was in Mexico right now. It’s been a while, and I miss it.

I am wondering if there is the value in DoFollow that there used to be. I have heard a lot of chatter about Google having de-emphasized the relevance of nofollow over the last few months.

Still I suppose it can’t hurt.

I started doing exactly as you have been doing after reading you last post, and wrote about it in the article, “Committing ‘Purgery’”. It was a really tough process deciding what should go, what should be deleted, what should be updated. I’m still not done. I plan to go through every post on my site one by one.

Ana May 19, 2011 at 1:12 pm

Hola, Jonathan – a nice vacation without internet access sounds great right about now! :)

Interesting you say that DoFollow/NoFollow doesn’t matter any longer. I’ve got several different software I run on my site every once in a while, and they all show that some of my most valuable backlinks come from NoFollow sites.

Of course, the software is not designed by Google… so we don’t truly know, but your hunch just might be the right one.

“Committing purgery” – love it!

Ana

Jonathan May 20, 2011 at 4:23 pm

It’s funny though, I went to the Dominican Republic back in February and for the first five days I didn’t miss the internet but at about that point, and I am going to sound like a real spoiled jerk, the resort kind of lost its luster and I started longing for home. and my girlfriend (I was there with convention). Anyway, I ended up spending my final two evenings away from the party and in the internet lounge on Facebook.

As for dofollow/nofollow, I think maybe Google realized that by creating this distinction, it started people artificially seeking out dofollow links and made a small problem into a big problem. Also sites like Wikipedia ended up with a tremendously unfair advantage given that tonnes of people were linking the them, and yet every link on that site is nofollow.

So the way I *think* it is working now is that Google wants you to use nofollow on anything potentially suspect, like paid links, just so you can show you’re being nice, but it might just decide to follow those links anyway.

In the end, it’s all guessing anyway.

Gera May 18, 2011 at 3:09 pm

Hi Ana,

Today after so many changes, I’m in the middle too: I’m do-follow but after 5 comments with NFFree – tired of being hit by spammers of only 1 post and run. Keywordluv enabled also :)

Cheers,

Gera

Ana May 19, 2011 at 5:09 am

Great – so you are now armed an dangerous – spammers beware. :-)

Heather C Stephens May 18, 2011 at 2:57 pm

Hi Ana,

I have been dofollow forever, but I have to say that I love the idea of granting dofollow links in exchange for loyalty! I will have to switch that plugin. I have also been making some changes to my site (behind the scenes based on your recommendation to ditch some of the less than popular pages.) Thank you for your wisdom on the topic.

I have a couple of questions for my SEO Savant (Only if you’re in the mood to play Q and A. If you’re totally swamped I totally understand!)

1. What happens to any links that were pointing at those pages I’ve deleted? I know that having errors isn’t a great situation to have either in the eyes of google. Do you recommend a specific 404 plugin to fix that problem?

2. Should I be deleting old threads in the forum on my blog or is it good to keep the pages there if they’re no longer active, but contain content and dofollow links for the members who have participated?

Thank you Ana, for another educational post! :)
Heather

Ana May 20, 2011 at 11:16 am

You know me, Heather – I can never pass up a good question! :)

1. You need a plugin like Redirection (that’s the name of it) to make sure your old post URLs are redirected to the new ones or at the very least to other relative pages or your home page.

2. I wouldn’t touch the pages on your forum – different dynamic.

Hope this helps, my friend!

PS I’ll be mentioning your blog in my Monday post.

Brian Flores May 18, 2011 at 12:17 pm

Hi Ana! Great call in removing any dynamic pages generated due to SuperComments and NoFollowFree. Good to know for me too. I’m totally okay with working just a bit harder to get what I need. Anyway, great way to keep your site up to par esp. with the advent of Panda!

Ana May 19, 2011 at 5:20 am

Absolutely – everything that is meaningful is worth putting in just a little more effort. Thanks for stopping by, Brian.

Audra May 18, 2011 at 11:10 am

I truly appreciate the advice you give. When I start to feel like I am just spinning my wheels with my blog, I can find an article (or four) here to help get things moving again.
I have been granting DoFollow to everyone thanks to a plugin – I guess with my small site it doesn’t matter all that much. I will need to read through some of your posts to investigate further about what I want to do.

Ana May 18, 2011 at 11:43 am

You’re welcome and I appreciate that you value my blog.

You are very generous with your DoFollow – do check out some of my other posts on the topic so that you know how to go about it when your blog grows.

Oliver Tausend May 18, 2011 at 9:09 am

Hi Ana,

changes behind the scenes can sometimes be more important than stuff that everybody sees with their eyes. So I can fully understand why you did what you did, it makes perfect sense to me. I learned something new today.

Thanks for sharing.

Take care

Oliver

Ana May 18, 2011 at 10:21 am

You are quite right about that, Oliver. Glad you learned something too.

Steve May 18, 2011 at 8:31 am

Ana,

Like you are doing now, I always gave keywordluv and commentluv links. I thought seriously about getting rid of keywordluv and making the ‘name’ link nofollow. (I still may do that at some point) but keeping commentluv dofollow.

I also seriously thought about using SEO super-comments plug-in you promoted, but decided not to.

Nofollow Free, though, is freekin’ perfect. I want something that rewards regular commentators. I am all about that. Meanwhile not giving away link-juice to the one-time commenter.

This is perfect.

No debate or decision on this one, I am going to load it as soon as I am done typing this.

-S

Ana May 18, 2011 at 8:39 am

Hmmm… Sure seems as though you have made up your mind! No debate! All the best. :-)

Mark Harbert May 18, 2011 at 7:52 am

This is a great post Ana. I never would have thought about doing some of these things, and while I can see why people might look at this as controversial it is clear that you are dedicated to providing good, solid quality for your readers, and without question it is going to continue to pay off for you. Your blog is awesome and an incredible wealth of knowledge. By the way, thanks for the “Dofollow FREE” plugin recommendation, I am going to check that one out. :-)

Mark Harbert

Ana May 18, 2011 at 8:30 am

Thank you, Mark. Yes, that is my commitment and I am happy that you find it to be a good source of info. Check out my sites, there are many great tools.

Ian Belanger May 18, 2011 at 7:36 am

Hey Ana,

The whole NoFollow/DoFollow thing still confuses me a little. I understand what each of them are and what they do, but I am still a little fuzzy.

Guess it’s time to go back and read all of your posts on the subject.

But I do like the changes so far, especially that awesome favicon. Where did you get that? :)

Anyway, thanks for all the guidance you give to all of us less knowledgeable bloggers out there. I know I appreciate it and I am not the only one who does.

Thanks Ana and have a great day!

Ana May 20, 2011 at 10:37 am

You are very welcome, Ian – and yes, I love my new favicon! :)

GabrieIe Maidecchi May 18, 2011 at 7:19 am

I have been thinking hard about DoFollow vs NoFollow myself, and I think I reached the conclusion to manually grant the DoFollow to people whose links I trust. I think DoFollow is a sort of “badge of trust” that the information you link to is somewhat relevant and related to what you do in your own blog, and probably it’s not the best choice to grant it to everyone, no matter what.
I will make another post soon explaining in details what I decided, so finally I can give it some rest :)

Ana May 18, 2011 at 8:23 am

That is a good strategy – I like it. Let us know.

TrafficColeman May 18, 2011 at 6:50 am

The do or no follow subject will probably live forever because some people still don’t understand the power of it. When you say link juice, some people may think your talking about a juice from the store.

“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”

Ana May 18, 2011 at 8:25 am

Haha! You crack me up :-) Luckily you’re here to help me clear them up.

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