Do-Follow, Nofollow - Do You Even Know Where You’re Going?

I recently installed the Google Do-Follow Blog Search to my sidebar to try and help everyone (myself included) find good quality do-follow blogs to comment on, but recent commentators have pointed out - and I have since confirmed, that the search actually brings back no-follow blogs as well - thus making the point of its very existence mute. (I am leaving it there but I am thinking of renaming it to ‘The Australian Labour Party’ in honour of this point)

So I decided to once and for all answer the No-Follow vs. Do-Follow questions, and give you a definitive guide as to what they are, how to find them, why you want them, and which tools actually help.

So what IS Do-Follow and No-Follow anyway?
In a nutshell: It is a piece of HTML code added to a link that tells the search engines whether or not it should pass authority along. (Note that it will STILL Follow the link)

The Do-follow backlinks get followed by the Search Engines and authority is filtered down to your site. It is the default attribute or value on any link, so you will not find it written anywhere in code. If you want to stop the follow, or you’re searching for it then you look for (or add):

But remember that the Search Engine will still follow the link. The nofollow tag simply tells the indexing spider to leave the authority of the referring site at the door - so to speak.

You need a mix of do-follow and nofollow links.

Because the nofollow tag only stops the authority of the site, it still shows the search engines a link. When you are building backlinks through blog commenting it is HIGHLY advisable to mix the Do-Follow blogs you comment on with nofollow blogs as well. You do this for two main reasons:

High PR nofollow sites will still contribute to your overall SEO.
Building backlinks from a mix of do and nofollow sites will make your link building look more natural - thus increasing your rank in the SERPs

Do-Follow Blog vs. Do-Follow link

It is important to not that only a link can be do-follow, not a site. The attribute of do-follow and “nofollow” are applied to individual links, not domains as such. Most bloggers who fix this issue will do so across the entire site, so for arguements sake, it becomes a “do-Follow Blog” and the point becomes mute. Anyway… it’s still good to know.

How to find a Do-Follow link

There are heaps of free tools to help you find out whether a link is do-follow or not, but for the sake of this post - this is what you would do.

Find a link on the page, preferably from another commentator - and see what the text says.
Right click on the page and ‘View Page Source’
Hit Ctrl F (brings up FIND function) and search for the text in the link
Look for the rel = nofollow attribute - or lack thereof.

Alternatively, you can search for ‘nofollow’ but since there are a lot of standard links on a page (read: social bookmarking buttons etc) that are by default nofollow, you don’t want to be scrolling through them all looking for one that might not even be there.

How to find a Do-Follow Blog

Seeing as my Google Do-Follow Blog search is a big fat FAIL, let’s look how you can use Google to find Do-Follow Blogs to comment on.

The plain and simple truth is that there is no guaranteed way of finding dofollow pages every time, the fact that Google’s very own custom search is not 100% just proves that point, but there are definitely ways around it.

If you want to find blogs to comment on that are do-follow then you need to look for other signs, like Commentluv. This is the perfect sign to look for if you ask me, because it’s so good for aiding your blog commenting /link building campaign and (again this is not a guarantee) I have found that a good 75% of the blogs that have CommentLuv installed are Do-Follow blogs.

So to find them I simply go to Google and type the following

This search returns all blogs that have CommentLuv installed and mention your keyphrase somewhere on the same page.

It works, it’s simple and it’s what I personally do to find blogs to comment on. The only downside to this is that I do not get the PageRank of the homepage, but that’s fine with me and I’ll tell you why in the conclusion.

So what’s the plan Stan?

It’s Alex actually… but, WHATEVER.

Use the search string above to get results
Utilise Search Status to get PR and Do-Follow attributes
Comment and add blog to an Excel spreadsheet

I create a list (over time) of 50 or so PR7 -PR3 blogs to comment on that are usually around 75% Do-Follow. This list then becomes a valuable asset to any site I build within a similar niche - and is something I will leverage later on down the track.

Alex Whalley is the Keyword Blogger and blogs about Keyword Research, on and off page optimisation and niche site marketing.

Visit The Keyword Research Blogger, Alex Whalley for more advice, insights, tips and techniques on how to find and then utilise the most profitable keyword for your next marketing campaign.