oops.jpgIn 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.

  1. First go to a page that has comments or links on it and note the anchor text.
  2. Second click “View Source”
  3. Third hit Ctrl F
  4. 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.

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

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>:</p>

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?

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