dmiracle

I Can Stop the Overwhelm...

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Finally, I’ve removed ‘nofollow‘ from comments.

As a blogger, or website owner in general, you want links coming back to your site/blog. Links to your site is one of the major ways to increase your Google ranking. That’s why in the blogosphere, link love is high currency.

If you knew that, then you likely think that each comment you leave on a blog would give you more links to your site or blog. Most often, though, this is not the case. Most blogware has a little piece of code it attaches to outgoing links from comments called a ‘nofollow.’ What does nofollow do, well, it tells Google bots not to follow links off your blog. Hence, no link love and no Google Juice.

So really, nofollow sucks. So bloggers like Ben Yoskovitz, Wendy Piersall, Chris Cree, Andy Beard and Chris Garrett have all seen the light. As has Robert Scoble. Well, I have too. So no more nofollow on dmiracle.com.

This means now that every time you leave a comment on my blog, you’ll get a little more link love to yours. You’ve helped make my blog successful, so it’s the least I can do for you.
Want to join the party? Here are some resources for removing the nofollow attribute from your blog comments.

  • Andy Beard has a the definitive resource for nofollow plugins for WordPress.
  • Semiologic’s Dofollow is probably the most used plugin for WordPress. Easy install, by the way.
  • You can also read Dougal Campbell’s piece on the nofollow.
  • MovableType users can check out this post.

I’m looking for resources to remove nofollow from TypePad and Blogger, if it’s possible. Know of any?

So, how do you feel knowing that all your comments (beginning yesterday) will now be full-on link love?�

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Chris Brown says

    So, if I follow you right, this will have a link?

    Can you give me an idea how to take the nofollow command off of my blogspot software template?

    thanks!
    Chris Brown, Marketing

  4. Andy Beard says

    Good move

    The best solution for Typepad and Blogger seems to be to switch to WordPress.

    Chris, I have effectively been running a no nofollow campaign for some time 😉 The list of plugins was just the most visible sign.

    I have also had a suitable domain setup to develop, I have just been waiting for one plugin to develop (allows 3rd party posts without joining a blog) enough to make it suitable.

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

  10. Char says

    Another task to add to my list of site enhancements. I feel a late night this weekend coming on!

    It is a fabulous idea, though.

  11. Dawud Miracle says

    Andy,

    I’m with you on everyone switching to WordPress. I love WP.

    I’d love to help out in some way on the no-nofollow campaign. The more I learn about this, the more interested I am in helping get the word out.

    And thanks for the Blogger link.

    David,

    Thanks for the tips. I’ll take a read. Also, made it a live link for you.

    Char,

    Join in…and tell your friends – both when you’re done and to do the same.

  15. Dawud Miracle says

    Amanda,

    You would need to look at the code view of a page of your site and then look for links in the comments to see if you find rel=”nofollow”.

    I just checked for you and you are using nofollow.

    Since you’re a WordPress user, simply get the plugin I suggested above and use it. That will remove nofollow from all comment links. You can contact me if you need more help.

  18. Dawud Miracle says

    Jenny,

    Yes, exactly. That’s my feeling, too. The more we can spread the word with our blogs, the more will find out and perhaps we’ll hit a tipping point.

    By the way, I love pjmommy. I know you’re just getting going, but I love what I’ve seen so far.

  25. Andy Beard says

    It is all to do with balanced linking structures. The more comments you expect to have, the more internal links you need to compensate, or just shrug it off as good karma.

    Ultimately a website has a certain amount of juice it receives, and a certain amount to give away.

    I like to spread the juice out between lots of pages, and have it relased through all the pages where people have taken part, and not just leaving the way it came in on a single popular post.

  28. Dawud Miracle says

    Andy,

    Thanks Andy.

    Matt, I try to remember that SEO isn’t the only aspect to a website. Sure, it’s important, but it needs to fit in with an overall strategy for promoting your site.

    As an example, I get about 1/3 of my traffic from Google. The great majority of the remaining traffic comes from links on other sites.

    Going further I see more return from those links than I do from search results. And since I want to build readership, conversation, relationship and business through my blog, I’m more interested in what referrers lead to those results.

  29. Jo says

    Thanks for explaining this. I’ve seen it around and was wondering. No Follow is now buh bye on my site too!

  31. Manila Mom says

    It works, too. I have a dofollow list and have been visiting dofollow blogs, reading and leaving comments. Not only am I enjoying myself and learning a lot, but my blog which is barely a month old is also ranking well at technorati, everything considered.

  36. Stuart says

    Have you found that you’ve been getting more comments since the removal of nofollow? 🙂

  37. Dawud Miracle says

    Stuart,

    Honestly, it’s hard to say. I’m writing to create conversation – commenting. So it’s hard to say how many of my comments (1500 in 4 months) have come because of the way I’m writing versus nofollow.

    I wish I had more answers for you. Many people who comment on my blog have dropped nofollow. You could write a post and ask bloggers about it. I’d be happy to link to your post.

    Also, check out Andy Beard’s no-nofollow community on Bumpzee. You could certainly ask there.

  38. Craig Belcher says

    [quote comment=”3729″]It works, too. I have a dofollow list and have been visiting dofollow blogs, reading and leaving comments. Not only am I enjoying myself and learning a lot, but my blog which is barely a month old is also ranking well at technorati, everything considered.[/quote]

    Same here although I am not ranking on Technorati yet but I am meeting new people and finding old ones. I ran upon someone that I had not talked to in ten years and was surprised he was still around. Does anyone remember iSales Digest? If you do your old school 😉

    If anyone wants to be added to my DList just let me know.

  39. Dawud Miracle says

    Craig,

    I ran upon someone that I had not talked to in ten years

    Now that’s a blog post if I’ve ever heard one. How amazing the web is. Wow!

    Thanks for stopping by and joining in the conversation.

  40. Craig Belcher says

    Dawud,

    Thanks for having me. I had a longer post but I forgot to add 1 plus 3 and lost the whole thing 🙂 I had replied that yes the web is amazing and explained how us older folks had to find and learn new things in the old days. Three words, dewey decial system. :)The youngsters have it made nowadays.

  41. Dawud Miracle says

    Craig,

    I’m in that in-between age where I know both. Sort of miss dewey decimal a bit.

    Sorry about the math problem…I’d love to hear more about what you were saying as you have time.

  42. Richard Appleyard says

    I also am not a big fan of this new tag. however more and more sites are implementing it

  44. Cin77 (The 15 Minute Dating Blog) says

    I have been using the nofollow plugin on my blog for a while now, and loving every minutes of it. It turns out with the Akismet plugin trapping spam comments are so much easier anywaz.

    One thing that I’m not sure though : would you be penalized if an outgoing link is pointing to bad neighborhood? How to prevent this from happening?

  45. Dawud Miracle says

    Cin77,

    Personally, I’m interested in building conversation and relationships through my blog. So I usually check out any new link that comes through…like yours.

  49. Celebrity Gossip Blog says

    The result of taking of no-follow is that people just comment for the sake of getting link back… but hey, atleast people are commenting right?

  51. Dawud Miracle says

    Oyunlar,

    Thank you.

    Celebrity Gossip Blog,

    I see a bit of that. But I think some of it has to do with your own style and wants. I purposefully try to write to encourage conversation. So I get few folks just wanting a link. And even if they do, you never know when they may be motivated to become a regular reader.

  52. Affiliate Marketing says

    Looks like a fantastic idea! Speaking to some SEO people I know though, they’ve just warned me that excessive usage of outbound links could be penalized by Google. Not sure if there’s any truth in it. Anyone care to enlighten me?

    – David

  53. Andy Beard says

    David I see you are having fun running around gaining backlinks for your new Affiliate Marketing site.

    What generally tends to happen on lots of Dofollow blogs is that type of comment, even if relevant will either get edited or deleted.

    If I didn’t know who you were, you might have also been added to my blacklist, which would have been a shame.

    There are multiple ways to mitigate any negative effects, and I prove that by outranking competing websites who are

    1. Older domains
    2. Higher Pagerank
    3. Using Nofollow On Comments
    4. Writing about the same products, and even have the same keywords in the title.

    The key point is that link juice will always flow out of your site, but you can choose where when and how.

  54. Dawud Miracle says

    Celebrity Gossip Blog,

    Thanks. It think, ultimately, it’s all about what your intentions are.

    Affiliate Marketing,

    That may be true, and yet not. If it is, I’m sure the affect is small. I still have a PR of 5 and see that with some tweaks it can go up still. So I’m not that worried about GoogleJuice myself.

    My blog is also about having conversations and building relationships so my needs from SEO may be different than other blogs. I don’t (yet) monetize my site, for instance, so traffic for me is all about readership.

  56. Dawud Miracle says

    Andy,

    Thanks for adding this. I was going to email you today on this topic. But I think what you said clarifies it for me.

    I also think people place way too much energy on search rankings. First have great content – then drive traffic. Otherwise your SEO efforts drive traffic to a site that doesn’t convert. That’s wasted effort in my book.

  57. El Yanqui says

    Brilliant. I’m a recent dofollow convert and I love it. Blogging is a community activity. Interactivity is the whole point of this. Nofollow by default really limits our interactions and there are other ways of achieving the spam protection. Nice blog, and always happy to support others!

  59. Dawud Miracle says

    El,

    Great. It seems removing no-follow is still gaining steam. That’s a good thing. My hope is that its spreads across the blogosphere. Thanks for joining in.

    mike b,

    I’m with you. Hate might be too strong of a word for me personally, but I certainly feel it works against what the blogosphere is all about.

  60. Juri says

    [quote comment=”4463″]Cin77,

    Personally, I’m interested in building conversation and relationships through my blog. So I usually check out any new link that comes through…like yours.[/quote]
    Dawud, how do You do this? Manually? This is very hardly, because the spammers could use some smart methods to hide his links in posts. For example, it is possible to use style=’display:none’ attributes in DIV and A tags, or use one-pixels construction <img src=’http://bla-bla.com’ width=’1′> inside the link reference.
    It seem to me, if skipp such links to some “bad sites”, your site cold have a penalty from Google.

  61. Dawud Miracle says

    Juri,

    First thing I’d suggest is a spam filter for your blog. Let it do the ‘heavy lifting’ of capturing most of your spam. Then you have some freedom to work with comments.

    Most of the time it’s pretty obvious what’s spam and what’s not. Though when sites are in languages we don’t read, it can be difficult.

    Thanks for visiting and joining the conversation.

  63. Juri says

    Dawud, I’m sorry, my site is in russian language and it is so difficult to detect is it spam site or not. But I mean other matter in my post above. Pls check below text – I’ll try to demonstrate invisible link reference between ##:
    #this is a hidden link to a Dawud’s Miracle blog# <a style=”display:none” href=”https://dmiracle.com”>this is a hidden link to a Dawud’s Miracle blog </a>
    You can see it if view page as HTML text.

    It is invisible for people, but visible for SearchEngines.
    The post entity could be very pretty visually, but to contain inside latent references, for example to warez sites.

    And how You check such spam commets? It seems to me there is a hole for spam 🙁

    PS: Sorry for my terrible english language, my native language is HTML 🙂

  64. Dawud Miracle says

    Doug,

    Great to hear. Welcome to the ‘club.’ And please, spread the word.

    Juri,

    Ah, I didn’t think about it being difficult to catch spam because your site is in Russian.

    You make a good point. It would be possible, I think. For English, spam filtering would still likely catch this. But for other languages, I don’t know how you would know. Boy what a headache it would be to look at the code of every suspect comment.

    “native language is HTML” have me a good chuckle.

  66. Zul says

    Dawud, how thankful I am to you for your great work. Keep it up and keep coming up with great discoveries.

  70. paul says

    Hello there, thank you for being such a generous guy and doing the “DO FOLLOW” code in your blog, I know more blessings will pour in. ^_^

    in the meantime if you want to enjoy a good read and a funny standpoint out of love, life and relationships you can go and check out the love doctor tips!

    http://reallovedoc.blogspot.com

    thanks for the free back links once again

  76. Vincent Liu says

    Thanks for sharing, I’ve done the same too. I have to disagree that it’s a form of blog spam, perhaps just for this single blog entry, and nothing else. In all cases, Dawud (and the rest of us) can simply close up comments. Keep up the revolution!

  78. Expert Lawyers says

    Well, this is great news, we all know that link building is the most painful process when it comes to SEO, so I just can say Thanks!

  80. Blogs for Money says

    Good job!

    I don’t like nofollow, it makes bloggers appear stingy – after all, it doesn’t stop the spammers (they don’t check if you follow before spamming!), it just means your readers are less likely to comment!

  81. Rio says

    When my poetry blog joined the dofollow movement I realized that posting an explanation of it would be inappropriate on my site. so I linked to you. Thanks for having such clear explanations on your site.

  82. Weight loss lib says

    Nofollow became a trend. I have seen many blogs have dofollow. I have tried for one week, The comments got more, more bloggers visit my blog. I think nofollow is needn’t for blogs. Just defend spam for google.

  86. mae says

    i just recently started blogging and i’ve seen the “u comment i follow” icons a lot but never really paid attention! stumbling on your blog encouraged and enlightened me! thank you. i will join the movement!!

    cheers!

  87. DeepFreeze says

    Be careful for what you link to. ;-). Though Google says that they do follow their “nofollow” rule serious there r some studies that provies other wise. Anyway good choose bro. You r helping small guys like up.

    —

  88. allie says

    I do have a question though, of course i am for nofollow, because i would love to promote my site, BUT
    do you need to put your blog/website url in the post itself? OR is the link created just through the “website” box above the post?
    Sorry for dumb question!

  91. Electric guitars says

    Good initiative. I speak about electric guitars,acoustic guitars and guitar tabs, not about SEO and SEM but this movement seems very good, the link love is always a good thing.

  94. Scary pop ups says

    I think this is one of the best decisions one could have for his blog. It is the nature of the internet, the nofollow thing was artificial IMO and I think that more and more people started to dofollow

  96. Ernesto says

    Thanks so much for the link love, or is it love link.Lol. Seriously, it is so much appreciated by struggling bloggers like me. On a different matter, David, can you recommend me a simple site/url on how create mini-site out of wordpress? Thanks for the anticipated response. And sorry again for the deviation in topic. Hurray to link love!

  97. iris says

    thanks for the great tips…i just put my badge today and now i’m heading to andy’s site to see how to check and remove no follow attribute in my blogpot site. cheers.

  98. Crestwood Animal Clinic says

    Thanks for the ray of sunshine on nofollow. I hate it and perhaps instead of abolishing it they can come up with a better way to allow sites to not pass link juice to undeserving sites or sites that don’t need it. I mean couldn’t it be some sort of system that if you use nofollow then you lose some juice yourself. Anyways, they have created a tool for the man to keep us small time web people down. Hopefully someone like Google will change things around for us.

  99. Dan says

    I am glad to see that there are people out there that have not forgotten where they came from and those that got them there. I mean does it really matter than places like wikipedia use nofollow? They are basically on the better reference sites there. I know that you always want to end up at the top but this nofollow concept just means no love for the small site/business owner.

  100. onlineearns says

    This is awesome! After checking out some of these sites I see they are still getting quality comments!
    May i will put this things in my blog too 🙂
    BTW, will it increase technorati rank ??

  101. Florentina says

    That’s great,thanks! Problem is, the nofollow tag appeared as a desperate measure against spammers and I don’t know if we’ll see, from now on, more blogs “sharing the love”. Even if the blogs owners are well intentioned and they really want to give a link to seriuos people, they are forced to include nofollow due to the big amount of spam they receive.

  103. Ecommerce templates says

    This dofollow movement is a double edged sword. If you think about it, it help your blog by increasing the number of comments but sometimes they may not be relevant, may be there just for the link. I guess your time to approve/delete them also increased right?

  107. Acoustic tabs says

    Great!Link love is the essence of the internet, it all started this way. Breaking it with nofollow is not right from the start!

  108. Free ecommerce website templates says

    Installing this plug-in may be one of the best actions a blogger can take! it improves your comment number and this is one of the most important factors when it comes to blogging. What shows the fact that a blog is visited and active? The comment number!

  112. rebate processing says

    This is very generous of you, thank you!

    By the way, great site! I’m reading around it now.

  115. wu-yi tea says

    Great blog, thank you for the do-follow. I am thinking about starting a blog, I will make it dofollow as well in the future!

  116. Evenflo exersaucer says

    I guess that this increased your comment number, right? Does your spam filter handles it? What do you use for keeping spam comments away?

  118. Bad credit car loan says

    As everyone in the world knows by now, most websites and forums use “captchas” to try and stop computer programmes from posting fake comments containing adverts. “Captcha” stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. And as everyone in the world ought to have realized by now, they don’t work.

    There exist a number of ways around them, the most cunning and most effective, although the most difficult to set up, is to build a pornographic website and get real humans to solve the captchas for you in exchange for naked pictures.

  119. Used Auto Finance says

    In most cases people shopping for used cars do not have the cash to buy a vehicle outright. They usually are in need of a loan for Used Auto Finance. It is important to remember that you not only need to comparison shop on the price of the car but you should do the same when shopping around for used car financing. It could save you a substantial amount of money in the long run. Before accepting an offer for financing a used car, educate yourself on the particulars of vehicle financing. Using online car loan websites to do research is an easy and effective method.

  122. learn to be rich says

    You Comment, I Follow You. Or At Least Google Will… Nice discussion here…I agree with you Andy Beard “The best solution for Typepad and Blogger seems to be to switch to WordPress”…

  123. Dr. Sally Witt says

    I am following along this path of the do follow posts and links. It is so important. I don’t know why this is not the NORM. Thank you for doing such a great job in explaining the whole story.

  124. Pelle says

    I’m using the plugin NoFollow Free 1.5.6 for WordPress, with which you can set the number of comments needed before the Nofollow is removed from a visitors comments links.

  125. Sands says

    Welcome all well i like this and i hate nofollow its really not a good impression for any blog if we use nofollow to stop spammers we also try to stop our commenter anyway you have done a good job. I appreciate it.

  126. mahum says

    hey that’s good that you allow to follow the links it will help you to generate more traffic and also help others to get back links ia really appreciate your vision about no follow

  129. Webmaster says

    We all want link juice and we want to drink it too!

    I think link love was one of the best ideas that came up.

    I think that this is the time for people to come up with more links! He he I mean new ideas to come up more links,

  130. Rapidshare says

    I’m glad you seen the light, and for the owners of the other blogs you have listed, i visited their sites too!

    It is true.. dofollow = mass google traffic ;D

  131. ed hardy says

    Adding the dofollow attribute deffinitely increases traffic flow. I have had some good results recently because of it. Thanks for sharing with others

  132. Jewelry Party Plans says

    Yes I agree with you , this is true that to increase google rank of your site , link love is really a high currency. Dofollow increases the traffic on that site.

Trackbacks

  2. […] I knew vaguely that there was this “nofollow” thing, but have been too swamped with the other 1.1 million things I need to get done to really figure out what it was about. So, I appreciated Dawud Miracle’s recent post on removing nofollow from comments, as it helped to clarify the issue for me. He posted a link to a plugin called “DoFollow“, which I installed this morning. Why wouldn’t you want to install this plugin? Akismet will catch the spam. I am grateful for anyone who stops by here for a visit, and even more grateful for those who encourage and challenge me with their comments. […]

  7. […] What does nofollow do? What it was supposed to do is greatly reduce comment spam. We all know that didn’t work. What it does do is tell Google bots, and other search engines bots, not to follow links in your comments. That means, when someone posts a comment, they get no Google Juice. I don’t feel that’s right. It’s sort of like thanking your clients by cutting off their hand (okay, maybe not that extreme). […]

  11. […] Dawud Miracle of Healthy Webdesign […]

  12. […] Randa Clay started the whole movement, inspired by Dawud Miracle, who again was inspired by several pro-bloggers including Wendy Piersall and Andy Beard. Dawud started after he found the WordPress plugin, Dofollow, on Semiologic. Randa then created the graphic you can see below and the I Follow-movement So my fellow bloggers join the U Comment I Follow-movement, turn off “nofollow” on blog comments and help make the blogsphere a better place Hit One Of Us Please: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]

  14. RandLIFE - Make the most of your website! » Blog Archive » Want a free outgoing link from my site? Read up! says:

    […] Dawud Miracle at dmiracle.com […]

  15. EmpowerWomenNow.com - Women entrepreneurs blog. An International Women Entrepreneur's Online Resource Center with free tips, tools, resources, networking and mentoring says:

    […] Piersall of eMoms at Home *David Airey of Creative Designs * Ben Yoskovitz of Instigator Blog * Dawud Miracle at dmiracle.com * Chris Cree of SuccessCREEations * Randa Clay of Randa Clay Design * Char Polanosky of Essential […]

  16. […] attributed to outbound links. Wanting to reward those who make the effort, lots of webmasters have started to DoFollow the link left by those that leave comments on their blogs, including […]

  17. Michael Haislip helps you make money online » Blog Archive » 81 sites with the NOFOLLOW tag removed says:

    […] Dawud Miracle […]

  19. […] Dawud Miracle at dmiracle.com […]

  20. […] I stumbled upon the I Follow Movement.  DUH! So that's what the Do Follow Plug in with Semilogic is all about!  Thanks to […]

  22. […] Ben Yoskovitz – @ Instigator Blog […]

  23. […] Dawud Miracle of Healthy Webdesign […]

  24. […] to do is greatly reduce comment spam. We all know that didn’t work. What it does do is tell Google bots, and other search engines bots, not to follow links in your comments. That means, when someone […]

  26. […] Hey Google Follow Me: Giving More Link Love […]

  28. […] to do is greatly reduce comment spam. We all know that didn’t work. What it does do is tell Google bots, and other search engines bots, not to follow links in your comments. That means, when someone […]

  29. […] Clay started the whole movement, inspired by Dawud Miracle, who again was inspired by several pro-bloggers including Wendy Piersall and Andy Beard. Dawud […]

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