It’s only a matter of time before that wonderful day comes that you get your first comment on your very own blog. I’ll coach for you to have a blog about your local real estate market, but how do you help it gain in popularity?
Good “search engine optimizers” will check your source code of your blog to ensure that a special tag is removed from all links. The “nofollow” attribute of a link will tell a search engine to NOT follow that link, therefore not helping the person who created the link to build those precious backlinks to improve their rankings in the search engine of their preference.
You need to make sure that these link attributes aren’t automatically applied to the links created on your site to encourage others to comment on your blog.
In a nutshell, to increase the popularity of your site you are going to want to encourage others to link to your site. In addition to this, you may be commenting on other blogs as well, which will then create a link to your site (most blogs ask for your website name when posting a comment).
If a blog you comment on has a “nofollow” attribute on the link, then you won’t get a dime of credit for your effort on commenting. How do you change that? Remove it! It encourages people that pay attention to that sort of thing to take the time to comment on your blog. Sure they may just be trying to build links to their site, but at least you’re getting comments and it looks like your blog has frequent readers.
So How Do You Remove It?
If you have a Wordpress blog, then it’s actually quite simple. TechForAgents.com is built using Wordpress. The plugin I use is created by Semiologic and can be found here. At the bottom of the page, click on the link that says V2.0 Download.
Once you download the ZIP file, you are going to want to extract the contents to your computer (remember where you put it!). You will then upload this directory to your website file structure under:
blogsitename.com/wp-content/plugins
After this is done, login to your Wordpress administrative backend and click on the “plugins” link at the top. You’ll then activate the plugin by clicking the activate link; the title should be “DoFollow” created by Dennis de Benardy.
A special thanks goes out to Eric Bramlett who specializes in Austin Real Estate for pointing this out to me.
-SC-
Related Posts
- Trulia Widgets Help Their SEO, Not Yours
- Tracking Keyword Search Hits
- Search Engine Marketing
- Print to PDF for Free
- Search Engine Optimization and Your Business
October 9th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Thanks for the shout out! Check out Lucia’s Linky Love as a great do-follow plug-in. When word gets out that your blog follows, you’ll get a lot of one time “me too” spammers. Lucia’s has settings that will make sure they get no love.
January 7th, 2008 at 11:23 am
I am using NoFollow Case by Case on one of my blogs and I like it. It is easy to use and allows me to let all comments be nofollow free, but then add it on a case by case basis.
May 27th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
I’ve had 3 WordPress blogs now and never knew about that plugin. It’s a great idea, especially for sites that manually moderate comments.
I implemented a similar feature at my blog/news post aggregator, so people who quality real estate articles can get the “love” the deserve.
August 7th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
You said good search engine optimizers will check to see if “Nofollow” was removed. I started looking at source code and saw that sometimes in place of “nofollow” it says “external”. is this a different code that affects whether SE follow or not?
August 8th, 2008 at 4:23 am
How do we do this for Blogger.com? From Michael Reilly s comment, do I replace “no follow” with “External”. Why do they want to prevent do follow anyway? I need to keep reading…for a couple of months….
August 8th, 2008 at 9:23 am
susan - The reason they want to prevent automatic dofollow is becuase people will spam blog comments just to get links back to their own site. The plug ins allow the blog owner to moderate the comments and allow some good comments from true particpants to get some link love to encourage activity. I get the reason behind it, I’m still just unsure of the technical purpose behind the rel=external.
August 8th, 2008 at 9:35 am
The best way I’ve seen this explained is by a forum poster named Ferrarislave over at Digital Point.
“rel=”external” does nothing except notify the browser to open a new window, like target=”_blank”. The only difference is that rel=”external” is xhtml valid, and target=”_blank” is not.”
It should still pass PR, in case you’re wondering.
August 13th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
I think that with Blogger you just have to remove the “nofollow” from the html and then it should work or change “nofollow” to “dofollow”?
I don’t know but I’m going to try both.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
You know, honestly this whole “encourage comments through do follow” philosophy is completely flawed and convoluted logic.
I mean think about it - why do you want your readership to comment? Because they appreciate the quality of your post (agree strongly, disagree strongly, would like to compliment your writing style etc)
Before they can even get around to checking if a comment box “is” do follow, they have to get here right? So shouldn’t it be your content that compels them to comment at that point, not the dofollow?
I really (honestly and truly) believe that creating a “do follow” blog to “attract” comments is doing nothing but “attracting” spammers. If your content was quality and users can find it - they will comment (dofollow or not) - if you “need” do follow to attract comments, then it’s time to evaluate the quality of your blog and you should CERTAINLY NOT turn dofollow on, as all you are doing is adding to what is likely lacking content with some seriously spammy comments that bring down the quality of the blog even further. (Case in point, the “London’s West End” spammer above) - Nothing but “me to” spam. How much you want to bet they don’t come back to call me on my comment
Btw - I found this post from the REW forum where someone had mentioned another member building links through commenting, I did a linkdomain: of their URL, found this post (ACTUALLY READ) what was written. strongly disagree with what is being advocated and THAT is what compelled me to comment, which is how it’s supposed to be.
SC - please feel free to nofollow the link in my comment.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Morgan! Thanks for taking the time to write over here. When this post was made, my idea was to remove it completely to encourage link building.
Through experience and in the influx of comments lately, I’m moving to the decision to turn this off for a while and monitor the new results.
Thanks for taking the time to read and post your thoughts.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
the way I understand it this feature will allow for selection of quality comments rather than those who post the same old “thanks for sharing” comment in an attempt to get a link.