"DoFollow" Scammers or Just a "Mistake"

DoFollow Link Scammers or Just a “Mistake”

8 January 2008 19 Comments

In my last article we broke down the basics of pagerank and the NoFollow attribute for beginning bloggers. I want to talk about what I feel is the dark side of No Follow and Do Follow links when it comes to bloggers.

Many blogs that I read proudly tout that they are a “DoFollow” blog, meaning that if you comment on their blog, the backlink to your site will have more weight on it than if it were a “NoFollow” blog.

Remember that Wordpress is set up to default to NoFollow out of the box, so them advertising as ‘DoFollow” means they would have had to do something to change the setup from the default.

Most bloggers will proudly tout that they are a “DoFollow” blog in order to encourage comments and activity and quite often it works. Everywhere a beginning blogger goes they read the more comments they make the better and a beginner would easily assume that a comment on a “DoFollow” blog must be better than a comment on a “NoFollow” blog….right?

Wrong.

Wrong for a couple of reasons, first off the site that you are commenting on must have a higher pagerank than you in order for it to transmit any “link juice” to you. Most of the DoFollow blogs that I have seen are PR zero. So a comment there is a comment just like anywhere else…nothing better and nothing worse.

The second reason that I have found is disturbing, I decided to check out a few “DoFollow” blogs to see if they had the “NoFollow” attribute on the link or not. I checked 3 blogs in a row that claimed to be a ”DoFollow” blog and ALL 3 of them were wrong. Their links had the “NoFollow” attribute on them.

They were either lying to mislead readers and entice more comments or the other possibility is that they were a victim of a bad plugin. I don’t know but it irks me when I find someone not upholding their end of the deaL, even on a little thing like this.

If you want to know how to check any link yourself to see if it is really a DoFollow link then read below…it’s easy.

First go to a page that has comments or links on it and note the anchor text.
Second click “View Source”
Third hit Ctrl F
Enter the anchor text (commenters name usually) in the field.

This will jump you to the link. A No Follow link looks like this…I took this from my own comments section.

“<a href=’http://www.ask-kalena.com’ rel=’external nofollow’>Kalena</a>”

You can clearly see the ‘nofollow’ attribute as I put it in bold face. Here is an example of a “DoFollow” link.

<a href=”http://www.klikdeal.com/” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackVisit(‘/outbound/commentauthor/http://www.klikdeal.com/’);” rel=’external ‘>Maureen</a></cite> on <a href=”#comment-299″ mce_href=”#comment-299″ title=”">2 January 2008</a>:

You can clearly see that the ‘NoFollow’ has been removed from this link. Is this a big deal? Maybe not to some but if you are going to advertise yourself as “DoFollow” then you ought be “DoFollow” and to be anything else is taking advantage of those who don’t know how to tell the difference.

What’s your take….scammers or victim of a plugin?

19 Comments »

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# 8 January 2008 at 3:07 am

David said:

The sites I have seen that advertise ‘do follow’ seemed like honest bloggers to me. Judging by the integrity of their content it seems like they were sincere in their actions and I never questioned if they were trying to scam anyone though I did not check.
Once I read a post by a gentleman who claimed part of his get rich blogging strategy was to leave as many comments at do follow sites as possible. I replied asking if he reciprocated in the policy to which he said yes but upon inspection it showed he did not. So scammer and liar there. Adios to him, good luck with his billions.
I run a do follow plugin myself which appears to be functioning. No advertising of it but mainly because I had not found a happy place to stick the graphic. No page rank for my site yet either…
Been enjoying your posts lately – keep up the good work.

# 8 January 2008 at 4:40 am

Bill (author) said:

Thanks David,

I agree that I think most of them intend to be Do Follow and I think some may not even be sure what DoFollow is and might possibly have added the graphic without knowing the difference.

It is very easy to be confused if you are new to this as the comments you leave will actually show up as a backlink, they are just backlinks that do not transfer any pagerank at all.

Commenting should be part of interacting with the blogging community, not a scheme to try and garner pagerank. That will be a fruitless exercise in this day and age I think.

Thanks for the comments.

# 8 January 2008 at 12:04 pm

Julie said:

Thanks for breaking this “dofollow” and “nofollow” business down to something a newbie can understand. Great post

# 8 January 2008 at 2:11 pm

Bill (author) said:

Hey Julie…thanks for the comment. It confused me too so I figured I must not be alone. My little trick is a very simple way to tell if someone is being honest. It’s not that valuable to most but it’s nice to know.

# 8 January 2008 at 10:58 pm

Tristan @ XscriptsX.com said:

Thanks for simplifying this really is a great blog.

# 8 January 2008 at 11:59 pm

Pamela said:

Great blog! Thanks for explaining the difference between “do follow” and “no follow”.

# 9 January 2008 at 1:07 am

Vic said:

You do not seem to understand Page Rank. Page Rank is a live thing the number you see in the tool bar is an avg that is updated every 3 months or so. In other words a post you see with a tool bar PR0 in fact might be a PR5 page. The more track backs you see in a post the greater potential for that page to already be having a PR3 and above.

# 10 January 2008 at 2:53 pm

Bill (author) said:

Vic…..hey thanks for the comment. I do realize PR is a moving target and maybe I wasn’t clear in what my intention was in the sentence that referenced pagerank 0 blogs. They might have a higher PR than they show and who knows what the future holds…today’s PR0 might be tomorrows PR3.

I do think that is the minority from what I have seen but I hope so…especially considering I am sporting a big ol PR0 right now too.

Vic do you know when the next PR update is? Does Google announce they are doing it or do they just do it?

# 10 January 2008 at 9:23 pm

Vic said:

Bill Google sucks at actually telling us but right now as we speak their is something weird happening either an update or another bitch slap because one of my blogs is showing PR0 and it was a PR5 LMAO.

# 10 January 2008 at 9:52 pm

Los Angeles said:

Thank you

# 12 January 2008 at 11:15 am

Zshare Movie fan said:

i also come up lot of blogs with PR 0
i guess they are bringing more attraction by featuring as no follow tag

but anyways i feel , commenting should not be done for sake of getting a PR juice
you can hire some one at DP for doing that for you

# 15 January 2008 at 12:25 am

Binh Nguyen said:

LOL… Laughing Out Loud!

You are making a wrong assumption because.
1. The dofollow plugin (or any similar kind) remove the nofollow attribute after the commenter leave a predefined number of comments on the blog. For that, if you leave only one comment that’s counted as not loyal and your link will have nofollow. Normally the blog which use dofollow plugin would have some terms in their comment policy stating how many comments are needed to lift the limit.

2. PageRank 0? Now it’s PR 0 but who know on the next PR update the blog you comment on have PR 4+ and their individual post have PR2 or 3? After all the comment should be relevant to their blog posts so that they will keep the links for you. And if everyone have the attitude to only comment on higher PR blogs than can the new blogs grow? Afterall, does it mean the big fish eat the smaller fish in the blogosphere too? As new bloggers have to comment on the bigger blogs but not vice versa?

Regards,
Binh

# 16 January 2008 at 2:40 pm

Bill (author) said:

Binh….you are making some assumptions yourself…not all of the dofollow plugins work like you mention above. I think you are referring to the Link Love but again it doesn’t much matter.

The article isn’t about the DoFollow plugin….the point was that a lot of blogs that claim to be DoFollow…aren’t. I contacted both site owners that I found the DoFollow inactive on, BOTH of which I comment on regularly, so any predefined number of comments set would have long since been satisfied.

As far as your comment on #2….I don’t get your point. I never said not to comment on PR0 blogs, my point was that many bloggers think they can just spam a bunch of comments out there and this is how they build page rank.

Many novice bloggers think a DoFollow blog comment is somehow better than a NoFollow and that is simply not true, depending on the site.

# 16 January 2008 at 11:21 pm

Binh Nguyen said:

HI Bill,

Sorry if I misunderstood you. I think I wouldn’t made the wrong assumption if you gave me some links to those scammers. Perhaps we could make a page called Dofollow Scammers report that point our fingers at all those cheaters and let everyone know they are not worth visiting.

However, I hope the inactive of Dofollow plugin is just a mistake due to lack of technical knowledge. Comment spam is an issue with blogging already, now comment scam is another issue will cause us to loose some more faith.

Actually #2 you are totally right now I can see. Building PR by commenting on Dofollow is only ethical if the comments are related to the blog post. For the recorde, a comment on big blog like Johnchow.com or Problogger.com could bring more visitors because they have over 15,000 readers, and that’s proven by many blog posts. However, that’s another issue: comment spam on nofollow but popular blogs.

You are doing well over here and I like your work. Let’s keep in touch.

# 17 January 2008 at 8:17 am

SEO News said:

Nice article on Dofollow, I’ve seen a ton of blogs myself that advertise for dofollow that were in fact nofollow.

If you get the SEO for Firefox extension, it actually highlights Nofollow links in bright red so you can’t miss them. This will make it easier for you and your readers to spot nofollow links.

Here’s the URL:

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

SEO News’s last blog post..Top Wordpress SEO Tips for Top 10 Rankings.

# 24 January 2008 at 3:42 am

Admin (author) said:

@SEONews – Thanks…I didn’t know that. I started using FireFox last week so I am still learning it.

I changed to FireFox when I noticed that 87% of my readers use FireFox and so I tried it and noticed that my blog looked different in FireFox than it did in IE7. I now am smart enough to look at it through both if I make a major change and I almost have all the compatibility bugs worked out.

I will check out that “extension” this weekend. I am new to these…might make a good post?

# 24 January 2008 at 7:34 am

webrunner said:

Thankyou for the easy walk through on checking do follow on blogs.
I can now check that my blog complies and won’t waste my time with potential scammers.

# 26 January 2008 at 7:11 pm