Most bloggers think that selling dofollow links is bad, right? But what if you do it in a roundabout way, without really intending to? Let me explain…

It started when I read Blog Begging or Donations? on the Cayman Host Blog. This discusses whether the rise of donation plugins like Buy Me A Beer or Buy Me A Coffee is a good thing or not.

While I can’t see myself ever asking for donations for a normal post, I am considering it for my DualFeeds plugin page.

It came to me that I should create a list of links, on the plugin page, to anyone who donated. This seemed like a nice gesture for people willing to give me some of their hard earned money.

Then I thought, “Hey, they’d benefit from the fact that I have nofollow disabled – maybe that’s even an incentive for them to donate”. Not only are they rewarding me for the plugin, they are getting a dofollow link on a page that might end up with a decent PageRank (the decent PageRank might be some time away, given this is a new blog).

But it raises questions in my mind. Is it okay to give links to people in return for a donation? Am I crossing the line if I use the dofollow link to sell making a donation?

Of course I haven’t actually decided yet whether I will ask for a donation, but I’m interested to know what you all think about this.