Jun

Commenting on Dofollow (Non-nofollow) Blogs

Filed Under blog comments, blogging, website traffic

I’d like to talk a bit about posting comments on dofollow blogs as a backlink strategy, as well as how to find them versus nofollow blogs. Typically, I don’t do much of the "commenting on blogs for fun and backlinks" type of thing, as I usually prefer to repurpose my content for article marketing and Web 2.0 properties. But, I know that a lot of people have questions about it, and it does offer a way to get some good backlinks fairly quickly.

In case you’re not aware, nofollow links have ‘rel="nofollow"’ in the link code and do not pass Google PageRank. They are therefore seen to have less value than dofollow links for SEO purposes. The term dofollow was coined to indicate a non-nofollow link (in other words, the absence of the nofollow in the link code).

Obviously, the best thing to do is to find dofollow blogs in your industry, and engage the Web community by participating in the dialogue. But, these activities can become time wasters and end up consuming you, so use with care.

Go for the niche, or go for the dofollow?

Some say that you should only comment on blogs in your niche. Some say that you should go only for dofollow blogs regardless of niche. I’m not convinced that you should be so rigid either way as I explain below.

Considering that many blog owners don’t even know that platforms such as WordPress and Blogger are nofollow out of the box, it may be difficult to find many dofollow blogs in certain niches. Although there are tools that can help, finding these blogs can be time consuming.

I also don’t believe that posting on blogs that are outside of your industry is a zero value activity. In fact, while I would prefer to have niche related (or somewhat related) links to my sites, I have two sites with a high percentage of non-niche related links that have easily achieved a PR 2 and 3, respectively. For both of those sites, almost none of the links are from related sites.

In addition, when it comes to the rankings of individual pages, nofollow links may count towards link popularity and reputation. So, having a large number of links with anchor text to a particular page (even if some are nofollow) may be beneficial. I would not, however, spend a large amount of time acquiring links from an environment that was exclusively nofollow (such as Yahoo! Answers) unless I had some specific strategy that produced a large amount of sustainable direct traffic. Yahoo! Answers has not yet proven to me that it can do that.

It also may not matter to which niches the websites that link to the page belong. For example, a link from Hugpages.com or Ezinearticles.com is a powerful link, and neither of those sites could be considered, per se, to be in your industry.

Obviously, for long term success, you’ll want to get a substantial number of related links in case Google decides to devalue links from non-related websites at some point. Also for obvious reasons, you’ll also want to get a substantial number of links that do pass PR. One of the ways to get links that pass PR is by posting comments on dofollow blogs, even if they’re not in your industry.

In other words, posting comments on both nofollow and dofollow blogs, both in and out of your niche, are good for your site. Focus more on dofollow blogs, and focus more on blogs in your niche, but all links are welcome.

Does commenting on nofollow blogs have any value?

One of the biggest questions, of course, is "how do I find dofollow blogs in my niche the first place (or dofollow blogs in general)?" The other big question is, "how do I know if there’s any value in posting on nofollow blogs?"

Let’s cover the second question first. Posting on nofollow blogs may seem to have a reduced value (and probably does), but there are a few things that people forget…

1. Other sites often scrape content from nofollow blogs and republish the content and may republish links without the nofollow. This is especially true of high profile sites. Spammers are (sometimes) your friend and you never know where your link might end up.

2. Republished RSS feeds can be indexed by Google and the links followed. Again, scraper sites will often republish RSS feeds, and in many cases the links within them are republished as straight HTML, which means the page and the links can be indexed by the engines. In addition, some people republish their own content that they have scraped themselves in order to boost link popularity and frequency of indexing and your link may get caught up in that. I’m currently doing this myself for my own content on Tumblr and Squidoo.

3. While we’ve heard Matt Cutts talk about Google’s handling of nofollow, it’s not clear that all the engines will behave the same way. Of course, Google seems to be the most link sensitive (and therefore the easiest to manipulate via linking tactics) as well as being the biggest provider of search traffic. It’s said that Google will note a nofollow link when it finds one, and visit the page and index it, even if it doesn’t pass PR. But it’s not that clear whether or not Google will count that link towards ranking the page. Which leads me to number 4.

4. A few people have tested nofollow links and found that it looks as though these links do affect link popularity and reputation. Michelle MacPhearson, for example, did a test involving a misspelled keyword. The page she targeted for this test didn’t even have that word in the page’s content, yet she was able to get the page to rank for that word using nofollow links.

While it’s almost impossible to test in a vacuum, I think this test is interesting because the term in question is not on the pages on her site, and therefore the links should be the only thing causing the page to rank. Not only that, the site went to number 1 at all 3 major engines for the term.

That having been said, let’s address the first question and look at how we might find dofollow blogs to comment on. There are a number of methods and tools, and I’ll see if I can categorize them for you. The first technique involves using manual queries, the second involves Google alerts, the third involves using tools that are built to do this task for you, the fourth deals with using directories and lists of dofollow blogs, and the fifth involves chasing backlinks.

Finding dofollow blogs

1. Manually searching for dofollow blogs

To find dofollow blogs, you could just go to Google blog search and put in your keyword and then check each site for nofollow/dofollow. You could also use various queries in Google to find nofollow sites.

Sometimes, you’ll find that a blogger has announced on their site that they "dofollow" or that their blog is "not nofollow." They may do this through a comments policy page, or even on every page. So, a Google search of your keyword and the word nofollow or the word dofollow may bring up a decent list that you can then further refine by looking at each site in question. This is not ideal and it may take time, but it may also give you a smaller list than if you simply put in your keyword.

The problem is that you don’t always get the results you expect (and neither to some of the tools out there). Sometimes the sites are not on topic, or they are nofollow. In some cases, you may need to refine your keyword search several times before the results look clean enough to then manually check each site. I have done this with mixed results, but sometimes some gems come up. You’ll often get a list of blog posts that list dofollow blogs, some of which may be appropriate for your niche. Those lists can be very handy.

What you might find also is that some of the results are duplicates because some of the scraper sites will show up in addition to the actual blogs that have been scraped. Unfortunately, this is the nature of the beast.

2. Google Alerts

I use Google Alerts for a number of things. Basically, what you can do is put the search terms that I just described in the manual technique above into a Google Alert for blogs, and then you can sit back and wait for the emails to come in. So, once you’ve found a search that produces good results, you can put it on autopilot giving you the latest posts to blogs that meet that search criteria. As soon as the email comes in, you can rush over to the blog and post to it. Or, you can do this once per day and get them all done at once, it’s up to you.

Again, this is not foolproof and it should be noted that even some of the tools out there have a problem filtering correctly to give you the results you want, with respect to both the dofollow aspect and the keywords.

3. Tools for finding blogs

Some people are using tools to find blogs. Some of these have a free version with an available upgrade. I have never upgraded to any of the paid versions. Comment Hut does not specifically find dofollow blogs, so you’ll have to check that manually. Comment Kahuna is another tool and it will find dofollow blogs. I have not used Comment Hut but I have used Comment Kahuna, and I have found a couple of good blogs to comment on via Comment Kahuna. I find it sometimes works well, and other times it works about as well as doing a manual Google blog search.

There is also free/pay to upgrade tool as well called Fast Blog Finder. It has a nice interface (e.g. listing sites by PR value) and I understand the upgraded version works well. The free version limits you to 50 blogs per search. I have found the results to be of medium to low quality. Perhaps I need to pay for the upgrade to get good results, but I don’t see the need at this time.

4. Using dofollow directories and lists

Before you do any of the above, however, I suggest you try this…

There are a number of growing dofollow directories, and you can simply search for blogs in or near your niche…

http://www.bigfootwebmarketing.com/dofollow/

http://www.dofollowblogs.com/

http://linkbuildingbible.com/dofollowdiver/

This site uses a Google CSE to find dofollow blogs…

http://www.ezbusinessneeds.com/dofollow.php

Here are a couple other search tools as well…

http://www.wibbly.net/dofollow-search.html
http://www.seo-traffic-guide.de/

You may just find that the directories and search sites listed above have most of what you need and will keep you busy for a while. If not, there’s more…

There are some dofollow lists out there. Be aware that things change… (e.g. a blog dofollows for a while, gets too much spam, and goes back to nofollow but it doesn’t come off the list).

Here’s a list…

http://www.michaelhaislip.com/81-sites-with-the-nofollow-tag-removed/

Then, there is Courtney Tuttle’s D-list…

http://courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/

Next, we have that list modified a bit with site PR and category added in PDF format…

http://www.digeratimarketing.co.uk/2007/07/20/over-160-relevant-link-following-blogs/

And, if that doesn’t do it for you, try this search…

http://www.digeratimarketing.co.uk/tools/high-prtraffic-blogs-without-nofollow-search-engine/

Now, let me stop here a second and suggest that if you have a dofollow blog yourself, that you turn the tables and add your site to the directories I have listed here. You can also add your site to those lists that are being maintained, and drop a comment on those blogs while you’re at it. This way, your site will be more easily available to those website owners who are looking to comment.

Also, there is Andy Beard’s dofollow community on Bumpzee…

http://www.bumpzee.com/no-nofollow/

Now, I think Andy hasn’t had much time to devote that site, and a few people have posted there that the list contains a bunch of nofollow blogs. But, see my technique number 4 on chasing backlinks for another way to use this site as well.

5. Chasing backlinks

This technique involves chasing down the backlinks of a particular site in order to find dofollow blogs that link to it. I think it deserves a bit of an explanation, so I’m going to leave this one for a future blog post where I can take the time to explain it.

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