What is DoFollow promotion?

Over the last couple of years blogs have grown in popularity. Spammers latched on to the fact that when adding a comment to a blog post they could add their link to the comment. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN count incoming links to websites and use these to determine which sites rank highly in their search results. To combat the problem of spam ‘nofollow’ links were introduced – search engines (supposedly) give no weight to these links. Most blogging systems and software (including my favorite, WordPress) now default to using nofollow links in comments. Many other sites with user generated/modifiable content also use nofollow links (eg Wikipedia).

More recently people in the know on the net have got a bit ticked off with Google’s double standards – they request webmasters to build sites for visitors without consideration for search engines, but also promote the nofollow tag (and a whole host of other stuff that I could rant on about all day, but it is 30′ and sunny outside & I want to go surfing). These people in the know have started the dofollow movement, where they properly moderate their blogs/sites and manually reject spam. If you make a valid comment on a blog post why should you not have a link to your site (which is probably related anyway?)

What does DoFollow mean to me?

If you have a website & you want some relevant inbound links you can find dofollow blogs on a similar topic, read them, and leave your comments. This will encorage the owner of the blog and the blogs readership to notice your website/blog, and also provide inbound links to your website that will be noticed by search engines. Search engines are actually quite clever these days (even with all their failings) and they will notice that your site/blog is aligned with the topic of the sites that link to you.

OK, great – where can I find some DoFollow blogs?

• CommentHunt.com
• DofollowBlogs.com
• Comment Kahuna
• DP forums

Don’t forget that the directory, search engines and software listed above aren’t perfect – you need to check the sites yourself once you have found them. Download a plugin for your browser like SEO for Firefox. This has a useful function that highlights nofollow links (the ones we don’t want!) You can see in the image below that Shoemoney’s name is highlighted red – it is a nofollow link, and I am not giving him any link love. Sorry Shoe, here you go.

Awesome – so howsabout an example?

Sheesh, I’m too good to you guys. Hope the weather stays good.

Step 1: I go to commenthunt.com & type in ‘SEO’ as my search term (lets just pretend that I’m trying to find a linky for this blog) . Top of the list is good old DaveN, another northern monkey with a passion for campervans.

Step 2: I hop over to DaveN’s site and find a blog post relevant to my site:

Step 3: I fill in the comment form, being careful to make my comment relevant and to leave my URL and name (name will become anchor text for your linky, you might want to consider this) :

Step 4: Hit ‘Submit Comment’, and there she is.

Note that on many blogs your comment will not appear until *after* it has been approved by the blog owner.

Any other related stuff?

Search the internet for yourself, fool! Oh, OK, Andy Beard’s post is a good place to start.

No-one seems to have realised that Wikipedia is worthwhile spamming for traffic alone never mind PR, so the spam ain’t going to stop.

Thanks go to AmCy of DP who won the auction for Hong Kong

I’m having a third (and possibly final) theme sponsorship auction for the awesome ‘Hong Kong‘ theme. See the auction here.

Spurred on by this success I have decided to auction another theme called ‘Flowers‘. You can see Flowers in action on Themey.com until the end of the auction (at least). Again, I would love to hear comments on the theme and the new site.

The auction is here.

Themey is auctioning the Glow WordPress theme over at DP. The starting bid is only $1.

Buying sponsored links on a WordPress theme is a great way to build (potentially) thousands of links. The links are build steadily over time, and you get to specify the anchor text. Check out this article on sponsored theme link building for more on the advantages of building links using this cost-effective method.

I still can’t make my mind up about PPP and ReviewMe etc. I’ve had some offers from ReviewMe, some I’ve taken, some I’ve not. I guess it depends on how it fits in. If I was to start posting about some of the topics available in PPP then I’m sure my readership would reduce pretty quickly.

I have another old ‘junk’ blog (or two) that has good PR that I have used for PPP and various other things though. You can make quite a tidy sum from blog posts if the PR is good and the niche is high value. If you have a PPP account you will surely have noticed that the majority of the offers are from financial services sectors.

I’m sure there must be a bunch of people picking up dropped domains or buying domains with PR & bleeding these paid posting services for all they are worth. I wonder how many checks PPP make into the background of the domain? Their requirements (from memory) are 3 months age and 20 post minimum. Setting up a blog to look like that by editing timestamps is pretty easy, you could even scrape another blog if you were so inclined. Archive.org generally wouldn’t have a history on a site 3 months old, so what other checks could be made?

Even easier would be to use an old hosted blog address. There are plenty of abandoned and deleted blogspot accounts available, never mind wordpress.com, livejournal and other smaller hosted blog providers. In the case of subdomains there is obviously no useable whois service, which makes checking the background even harder.

Relevant deep links are of increasing SEO value as more traditional methods of producing links (see directories and article marketing) are being devalued. If someone like text-link-ads.com were to produce a similar plugin to integrate with their link sales system it would be a great improvement on the blogroll style links they are selling now.