The Do Follow List
September 10th, 2007 by Stephen Cronin (2,011 views)Nofollow has been disabled on my blog for more than a month now. I joined the Bumpzee No Nofollow community immediately, but I only recently learned of the Do Follow List. I signed up a few days ago, but I have mixed feelings about this list.
While I want to support anything that promotes DoFollow, something put me off the Do Follow List. What put me off specifically? The comment Nicusor left on my site saying a link back would get a do-follow link on the list.
My first reaction was “hang on isn’t this all about DoFollow - shouldn’t the list be DoFollow by default?” His comment on my site gets him a dofollow link to both his main site and to the list itself - but I have to write him up to get a dofollow link on the list?
After I settled down a bit, I realised that I overreacted.
The logic discussed in the comments of my last post about plugins promoting themselves can be applied here. If Nicusor is asking for the link back to help promote the list, so as to help promote DoFollow, then that is acceptable, perhaps even admirable.
Having checked out his site, I’m pretty sure he’s genuinely trying to promote DoFollow. I should also point out that I did get a dofollow link on the page where you comment to be added to the list.
So I do recommend you join this list, if you are not already on it. However, be ready for link back request and try not to react as I did.
Nicusor, if you’re reading this, maybe you should explain that you’re doing this to help promote DoFollow when you leave the comment. It was easy to misunderstand this as being a cynical attempt to get a link - In hindsight, I know that’s not what you meant.
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I also have mixed feelings about do follow and have not yet implemented it on either of my sites. On the one hand the increased traffic would be welcome, but it is another game to play and manage. I will be interested in your feelings on DoFollow after you have had it in place for a longer period of time.
I hope you see a big increase in quality comments from being on the list. Have you noticed an increase in spammy comments? At least between akismet and moderation none will get through.
i think do follow is good for all of us. we get some traffic and if we comment a lot a few backlinks.
Stephen,
Great post, and honestly, I applaud your honesty. I do believe in the power of dofollow, for the simple reason that is a a chance for a small community of bloggers to work in unison to raise awareness and pagerank for our sites. Personally, I think it wrong that playing by the rules gets you punished by the big search engines, and the top page ranks and top SERs go to blackhats and sploggers. So I intend to support dofollow, and like you have joined the Bumpzee community. It even inspired me to start a blog about this subject, Ban No Follow.
I have posted an article on plugins to enable dofollow, and have been working on an anti-spam plugin article.
[…] to leave comments on do-follow blogs asking them to join my list. I take this opportunity to thank Stephen Cronin for pointing out an issue which I wasn’t aware of. The thing is that lately I have mentioned in […]
As promised, I wrote a post to explain the steps I took to promote the DoFollow (the link is above).
Thanks once again for your support!
Regards,
Nick
Sorry about the delay in responding - I’ve been tied up for the last few days.
Neena, so far, I’ve found Dofollow great. There has been an increase in traffic. There has also been an increase in spam, but it hasn’t been a big problem, thanks to my anti-spam measures. Of course this site is fairly low traffic at the moment and doesn’t have any PageRank to speak off. At this stage I’d wholly recommend Dofollow, but as you say we’ll have to wait and see how I feel about it as my site grows. Good luck in making your own decision about DoFollow.
mlankton, there has been a small increase in borderline spam comments. Comments which are clearly spam are no problem as Askimet picks them up, but occasionally I’m faced with a decision which could go either way (a really short comment or one linking somewhere that’s not a blog). There’s only been a handful of these.
Hoto, as I’ve said elsewhere I think Dofollow distorts the original idea behind considering links in calculating PageRank. But it is great for us!
Infonistacrat, like I said to Hoto, I don’t think nofollow is all bad (in a perfect world), but you’ve hit on the key as to why I use dofollow: we’re not in a perfect world. Blackhat SEO is already distorting things, etc. Although at the end of the day, the main reason I went with dofollow was that I was commenting on other people’s dofollow blogs a lot and thought I better join if I was getting advantage from it myself. Good luck with your blog, I hope it goes from strength to strength.
Hi Nick,
Thanks for responding to this and for your post explaining the situation. I hadn’t even considered the SEO impact of a big list of links on PageRank etc. Your reasoning makes good sense to me, now that I know what it is.
It sounds like you have good plans to turn it into something more than just a list, which would be great. I hope it goes well and I’ll support you where I can.
Hopefully, there will be others like you to support the Do Follow Movement.
Thanks!
Nick
yea im tired of all the no-follow links… it makes it tough to get decent traffic for blogs and can be a little discouraging at times.
I think these lists are useful and good for promotion, epically for quasi-marketing blogs like this… I know I found this site through a the DoFollow list on D-List and now that I’m here it’s a neat blog and I plan to return!
I removed all of the No Follow code from my Blog a month ago and have enjoyed more traffic as a result.
The Link Values and Alexa Traffic scores have improved, which after all is the goal don’t you think?
Nice Blog you have here. I too invite you to visit and comment on my Do-Follow blog at http://davedragon.rilysi.com
Later
Dave Dragon
Ride it like you stole it
Rich and DeMerchant, enjoy…
Dave Dragon, yes I agree. I’ve definitely had more traffic as a result. I’ll come and check out your site sometime soon - I can’t seem to access it at the moment (don’t worry, it’s not your site, this happens to me a lot as I’m in China).
You can display the source of the page and search for “Follow”.
On my blog the only “No Follow” is in the Robots.txt meta tag to prevent indexing of my Search Tags.
-Dave Dragon
Dave Dragon, I look at the source as well. Another option for people who are not comfortable with HTML is to get the SearchStatus extension for Firefox. After it’s installed, you can right click on the Search Status icon (at the bottom of the browser, looks a little like @) and turn on Highlight Nofollow Links. Any links on the page you are browsing that are dofollow will look normal, but any that are nofollow will be highlighted pink.
For the record, I have a 2 day delay on comments becoming dofollow and I use the Nofollow From Home plugin to make all external links on my home page Nofollow. This is for SEO reasons - it helps prevent PageRank leakage. I found the Nofollow From Home plugin from Andy Beard’s Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins.
Hey Stephen i use dofollow on all my blogs. I just feel its the right thing to do. because i leave links on other blogs aswell. Also i have noticed that a large number of outlinks which happens with DOFOLLOW rarely negatively effects SERP rankings as much as everyone thinks it does. If every link was DOFOLLOW we would have a lot more traffic for blogs around the world. I understand your logic and am a big fan of the blog, a subscriber in fact. Keep up the great work.
Hi Cricket, I missed your comment here, sorry about the delay in responding. Yes, I use DoFollow and 20% of my traffic comes from Google. What’s more, the site just got it’s first PageRank - PR4. So it seems DoFollow doesn’t have much of an effect (if any) on the SERPs or PR. Thanks for the compliments by the way!
Please publish do follow list
Juj, Thanks for stopping by. The link to the Dofollow List is in the first paragraph of the post - I don’t publish the list myself.
Thanks for the link to the do-follow list. This is helping us all out a lot. Thanks again. Andy
Andy, no worries! I’ve come to believe strongly in the do-follow movement, so I’m glad to help promote it.
I think joining ‘do follow’ movement would be fully effective when we already have high PR website. It would attract many people to visit and comment in our site.
My [URL=”http://notebookhaven.com”]site[/URL] is new, with 0 PR.
I’ll join this movement after the next PR update.
Debt,
There’s no need to wait… People shouldn’t base things on toolbar PR - it’s real PR that counts. My site went from a toolbar PR of 0 to 4 in the update in late 2007. Obviously my real PR was 4 before the update, people just couldn’t see it. People who had the foresight to leave comments on my blog before the update were obviously benefiting already.
That’s true - I jumped from 0 to 4 on the same update!
Hi Nicusor,
Great! It’s a good feeling isn’t it!
It’s a really pity people place too much emphasis on toolbar PR
True, true!
I really believe that having a blog with DoFollow will significantly increase blog comments. As long as you monitor the posts for spam there should be no problems.
Luke, the only problem is when you have to decide what is spam and what isn’t. It’s always clear cut. But I think it’s worth it…
Stephen you’re one dedicated blogger, would you mind sharing with me how long do you spend every day replying to comments and removing spam. Because from what I’ve been seeing this blog is about to become a real hit if you keep on acting like this.
I’d really love to congratulate you for your dedication.
Good luck mate.
Drunk Text,
Haha! It took me two weeks to reply! At the moment, I’m busy with offline stuff, and I’m well behind. Normally, I spend 10 - 30 minutes a day on comments and spam.
one more to the do followers, just wish someone would make some relevant comments that i didnt have to delete or get caught by spam
John,
I know the feeling! It’s not too bad for me yet, but its starting to get worse… Still worth it for the traffic boost and most people who leave comments do a decent job of it.
Nice post.I want to say,thank you.
Chantix, You’re welcome!
I’m currently waffling between using a noFollow plugin or not. It seems right to reward commenters, but I’m just worried about spending time screening spam. Although Askimet seems to do a pretty darn good job of catching most stuff.
Hi Megapixels,
Disabling NoFollow can definitely increase, but not all of it’s good traffic. For me it’s worth it, especially as my spam solution (Math Comment Spam Protection, Simple Trackback Validation and Askimet) seems to work pretty well.
It seems a little strange to me too that he would nofollow the list. Personally, I would dofollwo the lot if it was my list. Its hardly going to make much of a difference to anything. Just a little petty.
Here’s a directory you may wish to submit to:
http://www.bigfootwebmarketing.com/dofollow/
Levon,
Thanks for the comment. How do I get into you’re directory?
The reason behind making the list nofollow is strictly for keeping the PR3 of it - ranking better on google, thus promoting better the Do Follow Movement.
Cheers!
Hi
I have been thinking of making the blog of the company that i am working with dofollow. But the thing is i am still unsure about doing that, what we do is pure white hat seo so it takes a lot of work to make the PR go up and from what i garner is that doing dofollow really does increase the traffic but it may do so at the cost of lowering the PR because google does not really like it. so what i really want to know is that is there any proof that dofollow affects the PR negatively
hoping from a quick reply
Thanks in advance
Howard
Regards Levon’s comment, there is another dofollow directory up at: http://www.dofollowblogs.com/
Has a bit of PR to share too