DoFollow vs NoFollow But Which One.?
DoFollow vs NoFollow But Which One would you choose..?
On the face of it the removal of the NoFollow meta tag seems to be a great idea, but after testing on this website, I can tell you it is a total waste of time!
I had converted this site over to Do-Follow about 3 months ago, this was after reading many articles on the internet about the pro’s & con’s of the No-Follow meta tag. There were good arguments for & equally good arguments against the use of this meta tag, therefore the only way to really find out would be to put the theories to the test ! No-Follow..? Do-Follow..? Ok let me give you a little background for those that do not know the story!
Where Did It All Start..?
A few years ago, 2005 to be precise, Google created a new meta tag named ” No-Follow”, this meta tag was similar in operation to the No-Index meta tag, in that it instructed the search engines NOT TO FOLLOW links to other peoples websites, that it found whilst crawling your pages. This proposed new tag was incorporated into all new versions of WordPress & the aim of it was to cut down on spam / spammers.
Is This A Good Thing..?
Now on the face of it this sounds like a good thing to have right..? Well yes you would think so, however there were many website owners that were none too happy at the prospect of having their links tagged as No-Follow and so a movement started in order to try and get this No-Follow tag scrapped. Which, simply by the removal of this meta tag, would mean that your website or blog would then become DoFollow again.
Well as stated at the very beginning of this site, we test out theories & ideas so that you do not have to run the risk of ticking off the Google monster hahaha. So after 3 months of testing what’s our verdict on the DoFollow / NoFollow issue..?
Our Verdict On Do-Follow
Ok what we found was that 95% of all comments received after removing the No-Follow meta tag, were made simply to aquire a backlink, furthermore what adds weight to this claim is the fact that although there is a comments policy & a request is made to read this policy, I am still receiving a dozen comments per day that blatantly defy the rules laid down in the comments policy. This tells me that the would be commenter is focused on one thing only and that is getting an easy backlink, to what is very often, a crappy website!
As for the argument that you do not receive backlinks from sites that have an active No-Follow meta tag, all I can say to this is “rubbish” ! During this testing process, I had made a comment on “ProBloggers” site, which is a No-Follow website, yet I received a backlink from my comment. This was the first time I had ever visited Darrel’s blog and so there was no other possible explantation for this backlink, other than it was related to my comment.
Now there is also the argument about getting additional traffic from listings in Do-Follow directories & yes you can get traffic from such listings as I have done with this site, but what you do not realise is that the vast majority of people search a Do-Follow directory for one thing & one thing only, BACKLINKS! They are rarely interested in what your blog is about, or your latest article, they are purely focussed on finding similar blogs to their own so they can go drop a useless comment & get an easy backlink.
The Conclusion
So my friends unless your blog is very new and you are struggling to aquire any backlinks, I would suggest that you remove any plugins you have that supress the NoFollow meta tag & allows your site to become DoFollow, this will put your blog back to the way WordPress intended it to work. I will be removing the plugin from this site after finishing this article & focus more on what I should have been doing in the first place, writing quality articles!
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Posted by Steve (Admin)
on May 4 2010. Filed under Blog Promotion.
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Hi Vicky,
There is an aweful lot of mis information floating around the net & it has taken me a good couple of years to test out my own & also a few others, theories !
Which was the original purpose of this site, a sort of guinea pig if you like.
Anyway if you need backlinks, then take a look at Blog Links & Bookmarks
It is another site I have an involvement with & I use it for gaining backlinks on all my sites, this one included !
Cheers Steve
Hi,
I am glad I finally found an explanation that makes sense on do-follow or no-follow. I have fairly new blog with no backlinks as of yet and was considering making it do-follow but after reading this I know I will not do that. I will just keep trying to add good content to build up my reputation.
After a lot of reading about this topic I think the nofollow tag is a great deterrent for the useless posts that people tend to put in as Debby already mentioned. I guess it’s much better to have comments which actually discuss the topic and give a better insight or opinion to the topic to add value to the site instead of having tons of irrelevant traffic, pushing the main body of traffic who actually want to make appropriate comments. I’m sure this has already been discussed by just reiterating the value of this tag. At the end of the day a quality blog requires quality comments to keep people coming back.
Hahaha, yes you would not be the first to come to that conclusion !
I personally think that google set up this as a way to improve the web but still credits the links in some way …. food for thought?!!
Debby,
What you suggest is a nice idea, but from what I have seen if most cannot even be bothered to follow a simple instruction like fill in YOUR NAME
then I don’t think you stand much chance of getting them to like anything on Facebook !
But you never know, pigs may fly after all
Hi Debby,
Well we actually tried both ways, the standard NoFollow which is what a WordPress blog is normally set to, but we also tried for about 3 months with the site set to DoFollow. To be honest & as you rightly point out, the vast majority of commenters are the obvious backlink hunters, that just keep posting feeble comments in the hope of gleaning a backlink, and although I clearly request a persons name as opposed to a keyword, the vast majority also ignore that completely & so get their comments trashed!
I did stumble upon a Matt Cutts video that clearly stated converting your blog to DoFollow can harm your reputation & this was one of the main reasons we later converted back to NoFollow.
Most people will tell you that you cannot get links from Nofollow sites, but I have 2 links from ProBlogger which is indeed a Nofollow site, so I think it has more to do with the quality of your comments than anything else.
Sorry for the lengthy comment before but I forgot to ask my question. Do you think that there would be a way to make it a prerequisite that a potential commenter must first perform an action such as “LIKE” my Facebook Fanpage or something of that nature before they can post a comment? I notice you require a log-in. I was just trying to think of a way that the blog owner could also benefit while cutting down on spammy comments.
I’m so glad I found this post. I’ve spent the last hour or so trying to find info to help me decide whether or not to make my site a no-follow site. While I certainly do understand the benefit of backlinks and I do comment on blogs from time to time, I always read the entire post and try to only comment if I actually have something relevant to say.
The majority of comments I receive however are just pure fluff such as, “excellent post” or “keep up the good work” or “I really enjoyed this” but I doubt that many of them have ever even read my posts.
Hi Matthew,
Yes I have several no-follow backlinks myself on this site, so to those people that say you cannot get backlinks from no-follow sites ! Think again, because Problogger.net is no-follow, yet I have 2 backlinks from that site. I guess it all depends on the quality of your comments..?
Maybe this might interest you… I have been doing a bit of testing myself I launched a website for a client for a hotel in a town in australia and all of our backlinks are from blog comments, form sites with the nofollow attribute yet we are ranked #1 getting over 2000 unique targeted visitors a month..
I personally think that google set up this as a way to improve the web but still credits the links in some way …. food for thought?!!
hmmm really nice story….The thing i believe we should never rely on backlinks if you are true blogger.work hard and do hard untill you get successful
Thanks
Then Kevin, I am afraid it will have to be less comments as I am well & truely cheesed off with the feeble pathetic attempts to gain a backlink, with stupid comments!
I agree with you.do follow will your blog spammer’s den and not follow is good,but you will get less comments