NoFollow, DoFollow, MarshMallow

Here’s me trying my hand at explaining the ramifications of these terms. First two words have something to do with comment links (you can argue that these two words may pertain to any link and you will be right, but in this case I am limiting my explanation to the links found in the comments area) while the last one goes well with hotdogs and bonfires and is generally considered delicious.

Ok, here we go.

Most blogging platforms are inherently NoFollow, which means that any link (usually author’s URL) included in a comment will not pass PageRank. I say most because I haven’t tried out all the blogging platforms out there. And even if I say “All” I could still be wrong. Either way I’m screwed. The relevance of not passing PageRank is that the link that you included in a comment that you made will not have any value as far as your PageRank is concerned.

We all know that backlinks are supposed to count as a vote of approval for your blog, however if that backlink is NoFollow, it’s like shooting blanks. Alright control your overactive imagination. Now what it doesn’t mean however is that search engines will not crawl these nofollow links, they will, and they’ll come a-knockin’ on your door, but that’s just it. Although these links are still counted as one of your backlinks, they’re just not that valuable.

DoFollow links on the other hand are the kind of links you want. Spiders crawl them and they’re considered an affirmative vote in your favor. So if you’re on a link building mission with the intent of skyrocketing your PageRank via a commenting strategy, you would be much better off seeking out those DoFollow blogs. Here’s a DoFollow community that you could join to get you started.

So You Want Your Blog To Be DoFollow Eh?

A bit of caution on this one. DoFollow blogs are easy target for spammers so I recommend that you enable comment moderation for you to sort out which ones to grant your precious Dofollow link. If you don’t have the stomach for this, better stick to nofollow. Still there’s a valid argument to be made for making your blog DoFollow. For one, it motivates your regular readers to comment which could result to a lovely discussion on your posts. Fair enough?

Now, if you use WordPress, you’re in luck. There are a lot of DoFollow plugins out there starting with this one. Or if you want to make things a bit more manageable(remember my note on spamming? this is a good tool to mitigate that), you can use this one– this is an interesting plugin that only activates DoFollow for commenters after they’ve posted a number of comments. Very nice huh?

Now if you’re on blogspot, go switch to Wordpress!

Kidding. Actually here’s this tutorial for blogger’s beta template that you can use. It’s actually very easy to follow. Again, better turn on that comment moderation thing before you do this.

But What About CommentLuv?

What about it? It parses the visitors last blog post and that’s it. Unless the DoFollow plugin is installed, it’s still NoFollow.

Free Wordpress SEO eBook

This free SEO eBook could not have come at a better time. I have recently migrated my free Blogger blog to Wordpress and I was anxious to do everything right the first time. Luckily I found a good Wordpress resource from the Search Engine Journal site. This resource is a FREE WORDPRESS SEO eBOOK authored by Mihaela Lica of http://ewriting.pamil-visions.com. I have been an avid subscriber of Search Engine Journal and have religiously read their articles everyday. I find most of their posts to be very helpful for bloggers.

The FREE SEO eBOOK is especially written for Wordpress although it can be adapted to apply to other blogging platforms as well. Although the SEO techniques described therein is very basic from the point of view of an SEO expert, to a newbie blogger like me, the techniques were very helpful. The FREE SEO eBOOK covers general topics from installing Wordpress to link building tips.

I especially liked the part where that very helpful Wordpress plugin, All-in-one SEO Pack was discussed. It’s very enlightening and made me realize the mistakes I’ve been doing all along.

I strongly suggest and recommend that you download and read the FREE WORDPRESS SEO EBOOK.

Page Rank Leakage

One interesting thing related to links is the idea of a PR leakage. The PR theory is that a single link to another site counts as one editorial vote. Editorial votes are the building blocks of Page Rank. Accordingly, the higher the PR of the site doing the voting the bigger will be the impact come PR upgrade time. This also has a bearing on a particular site’s SERP standing.

Supposedly, PR leakage occurs when a certain blog has way too many outgoing links. When this happens that site’s voting power becomes less potent compared with others of the same PR but with way lesser outgoing links. That’s the general idea behind this concept.

Now whether you believe this concept is entirely up to you. I have read about this in several authoritative blogs but I have yet to read about a concrete example of this. Although this makes a lot of sense to me, I still wonder how this actually pans out. Will a blog with too many outgoing links be downgraded in the subsequent PR upgrade?

It seems improbable however that a blog, not a directory, would have that many outgoing links, unless you participate in one of those viral blog link thing, or you’re engaged in excessive reciprocal link exchanges. Now that’s something that you don’t want to be caught red handed now that you know better.