Hmmm, interesting stuff all this! I never knew that there was so much to learn!

I’m just learning about this whole “do follow” craze, and am liking what I’m hearing. Your synopsis of the situation is greatly appreciated.

I started to wonder, though. If everyone starts this then won’t the links become less valuable?

Amy – that’s a good question, I don’t know. We’d have to ask an expert like Andy Beard.

If you find an answer let me know!

Meanwhile I do think spammers win the day on this one, keeping people from not using DoFollow or reverting, which we’ve started to see on some blogs…and that’s a shame for everyone.

The short answer is you can twist your brain into such a complicated knot thinking about it that you will never get it untangled, and probably lose track of what your intended purpose was.

I like to think people are more likely to subscribe to dofollow blogs, more likely to leave comments of value, have conversations, and link.

I have gone in depth into the geeky side of the SEO implications. I generally advise anyone with basic to intermediate SEO skills just to ensure they have plenty of internal linking on each page through to relevant content.

I have also explained some quite complex robust linking structures for an ideal situation, though I can’t currently give any technical support on achieving them. I still need to get them set up and tested for myself.

Hi!
I use the Nofollow-Case-by-Case Plugin which is generally dofollow but allows you to selectively apply rel=”nofollow” to your comment links. So you still can make shure not to link to bad neighbourhood or share your pr with plain spammers.

Some people get excited about the dofollow thing, but there is a caveat. If you are linking sources, or informational links in an article, consider who you are sending traffic to. Not everyone needs your link love (wikipedia is doing just fine without you), so consider your links and use nofollow accordingly.

Amy asks “… won’t the links become less valuable?”
In the sense of passing link value back to your site, Google-juice if you will, yes they will become less valuable. As more and more links are made from this very page, for example, the PR that’s passed by each one will diminish.

BB

Andy says “It is a great way to encourage legitimate thought provoking comments, and links from others.”

Yes absolutely, and the good thing about that is peer pressure will mean the majority of bloggers will have to at least consider rethinking their nofollow policy or else risk having to write all their own content. The MFA community won’t like that!

BB

It would be nice actually if the web went back to how it was originally with everyone using dofollow by default but responsibility was exercised by default by posters. Sigh

BB

(three posts and counting

You see this page?

http://www.instigatorblog.com/wp-comments-post.php

Well, if I do a long post, in FF it just freezes on this page and the post doesn’t get made. I’m trying this in IE7, let’s see how this one goes.

BB

Nope, didn’t work, I’m going to try two shorter posts.
well they didn’t work either. I note that Andy has made some longer posts but I have to say you have a problem on this blog, posts over a certain length just cause it to freeze.

BB

I am in on this as well. This is a great plugin, which is a win-win situation. No wonder why this is spreading with the speed of light.

Same here, freezes on long posts. I emailed you a comment.

Ah, mlankton, you emailed me personally or Ben? I get between six/seven thousand emails a week, (my ISP loves me!) and unless you put SEO in capitals in the subject line or similar I’ll very probably miss you. I scan the subject lins and thast’s it. mostly, everything gets deleted on the server.

But I’m glad to hear that it’s not only me having problems posting.

BB

On the advice of my friend Jeff, who has been blogging for awhile, I commented on some dofollow blogs last week. Initially I told him that my site was less blog-like, and would develop differently, but he insisted, and I relented and followed his advice.

He advised to get as many as possible, since my site is less than a week old. I told him that I wasn’t going to comment on any topic that I didn’t actually have an opinion on, so I spent an entire evening reading blog entries, and passing on the great majority of them, commenting on maybe 15 sites. When I found an article that was actually of interest, I left a relevant comment.

I can understand intolerance of comment spam, but don’t punish commentors who take the time to seek you out, find and read one of your articles in it’s entirety, and take the time to participate in your discussion.

The results? Not one single dofollow from the dofollow blogs. I don’t know if that was due to my using the screen name AV Enthusiast, which I have also used in web forums, and is incidentally the name of my site.

Sorry about the multiple posts, but your comments freeze on long posts.

So what’s the problem, am I a spammer or is the dofollow community not practicing what they preach?

@SEO BB & mlankton: Not sure what the problem is with posting long comments. Could be an errant plugin or something of the sort. I’ve never had anyone else mention this…

@mlankton: I’ve got the Link Love plugin set to give you Do Follow benefits after 3 comments. If it’s not working that’s a problem with the plugin itself. I’ve never checked specifically; I assumed it was working and left it as is. But you can tell me otherwise…

As for the rest of the DoFollow community, I doubt anyone says they’ve removed NoFollow but then doesn’t. If anything they install a plugin and it doesn’t work, and they don’t realize it.

There are 2 problems I have heard about with Link Love, first php versions, and secondly the amount of processor cycles it uses.

A few people have used dofollow and then removed it after a while, either after careful consideration informing their readers of why, or just decided to remove it.

There are very popular bloggers who removed their Dofollow plugins without saying anything, well before the current “movement” even started.

Ben, you might like to check out Lucia’s Linky Love, I think it is much better coded, and in very active development.