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My new friend Ruben was asking about DoFollow promotion. I was about to email him back, but decided to turn the email into a blog post instead.

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.

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