Dofollow Linking Out From Your Blog is Good For SEO
Removing rel=nofollow and linking out to other websites is good for your SEO.
For a few years now I’ve been proud to be known as a dofollow blog. And so long as my visitors don’t abuse the trust I place in them by commenting with spammy names, I’m pretty happy to link out to anything except porn pills and poker.
In my posts I try to link as much as possible however to date, I’ve been reluctant to link using keyword rich anchors to pages on 3rd party websites for fear of being too generous. To this end you might have noticed a lot of my external links use the anchors ‘here’ or ‘take a look’.
Over the past month I tried an experiment and switched off my dofollow plugin for WordPress, making all links from the site nofollowed like most default installations of WordPress.
I haven’t changed much of anything else and left the changes to be indexed. To my astonishment, my site plummeted from 4th to 8th for my chosen keyword. Confident that the site had been fully re-indexed, I turned my dofollow plugin back on and reinstated dofollow links throughout my site.
The net result is that once again my website has risen through the search engines to a prominent place.
The up-shot of this research is that by using the default nofollowed state for all links on your blog and its comments you are in fact holding back your website and reducing its ability to rank.
I’s further like to highlight that most of my comments link to sites of unrelated topics so make of that what you will.
Happy dofollowing.
<a href=”http://anegativenarrative.com>Loads of porn stars doing it all dirty and that whilst playing poker. Also loads of pills for keeping your erection for longer available here. LIVE STREAM VIDEO!!!</a>
I think I’m getting the hang of this SEO lark y’know!
Hahahahaha… love it!
Never thought that nofollowing comments could affect your placement in the SERPs. Interesting to see the results you have had with this Mark. Thanks!
it surprised me too
Interesting results… think I’m going to give it a shot and see what happens. Personally I’ve always been skeptical of nofollow link strategies as it seems somewhat greedy, selfish and against the spirit of the web so not surprised that Google would prefer people to use dofollow links.
Though you do not consider it necessary to comment on Do-follow blogs, but it a reality that they are valued high by Google. If a Do-follow blog-post has got an average content, even then people would like to make comments on them, to get noticed by Google.
What you mean like your comment where you had a spammy name?
Yaa you are right,It is spammy name but i want to grow my backlinks,What shuld I do?
Hi Rao, for a start realise that all your links dont have to have keywords as anchor text and that by commenting with your real name you’re a. most likely to have your link accepted and b. not spaming a site
ok I understand but i’m a bussinesman and working with clint.It is not my personal domain so how can i creat a link with name because it is real keyword.
Thanks…
because that would be the honest thing to do… think of it like a mix of anchor tags that would naturally occur. if your client was to comment on blogs hed probably use his real name and not the business one.
Nice to see your response and show the link on my real name.Can you accept my link by using HTML tag .
[link removed]
Hi Rao, if the link was something that added to the theme of the post then yes i’d keep the link in, as it is its just a link to your site… why not create a blogpost on the site that contributes to the theme of the post and put a link to that.
in any case your name, as the first link to the target site, would pass the anchor text… not any subsequent links to the target site… so if you’ve noticed your name Rao is now an active link
DoFollow linking is preferred but not required. I do SEO on both, don’t really care if it’s nofollow all I know that they contribute a lot on my link building result and make it more natural.
No, I don’t think, because all nofollow links can never increase the pagerank of a website and we can get more link juice from dofollow tags. It helps you to increase your website page rank. So dofollow link is always good for SEO.
To my knowledge, search engines see ‘nofollow’ links as well, and may spider them. Whether or not some link juice is really passed from nofollow links no one knows for sure. It is many times assumed not, but some suggest that it may pass a little.
I am moving towards offering my blog for dofollow commenting. Akismet seems to block most spam and if I get some decent trackbacks and commenters I’m enclined to dofollow their urls. At the moment I’m doing this manually or if you comment more than 3 times. What can I say? I like to be in control lol! I’m controlling this using the SMu Manual DoFollow plugin by Stefan Murawski which can be found at http://blog.murawski.ch/2010/09/wordpress-manual-dofollow-plugin/ alongside the Disqus commenting system.
Glad to know my recent move towards dofollowing comments may help. Thanks for the article!
Yes, I’ve had a similar experience with the whole do follow – no follow mission. I think Do Follow is definitely the way to go forward. Linking to others can only help you, and there’s no harm if someone else benefits as well.
It’s a minefield, it really is… Who knows how google works. All we can do is guess as best we can and pray that what we do and the huge amounts of time we spend linking actually work?!!?