Way back in November 2008, I decided to start an experiment. Against the advice of a few SEO professionals, I decided to see what would happen, if I offered ‘dofollow’ links from the comments section of this blog.
I have been able to take this gamble, because this blog is 100% free of advertisers, affiliates and sponsors. In other words, I have none of the traffic pressures many of my fellow bloggers have.
After 6 months, here’s my experience.
What’s a dofollow link?
Briefly, for those who do not already know, when you leave a comment on a dofollow blog, the links you put in your comment are followed by Google, from the blog, to wherever your link points. However, the vast majority of blogs and websites offer ‘nofollow‘ links, which means that Google is told not to follow the links you leave in your comments. By offering dofollow links, it’s believed that you give a tiny SEO boost to those who comment on a blog.
The dofollow results
3 weeks ago, I removed the dofollow attribute from the blog, so that I could see what difference, if any, it made. I thought it would take weeks to notice any real, measurable difference, but the change started after just a few days.
Here’s what happened.
Spam comments from REAL people
Sadly, this blog slowly became a magnet for people seeking to get dofollow links for their sites and their client’s sites. This form of spammy commenting, has already all but stopped. This is because those who make a living from targeting dofollow blogs, usually have software installed on their machines, which shows immediately if a blog is dofollow or not; (like Quirk’s popular SearchStatus plugin for firefox).
Let me make this clear – I am NOT talking about automated spam, which every blogger gets. I am referring to spammy comments left by real people, exclusively designed to get dofollow links to their site (or their client’s sites.)
Search engine results
After just 3 weeks with the dofollow attribute turned off, search traffic to this blog from Google has increased by over 25% (and it’s still increasing.) My Google Pagerank has also increased from 3 to 5. I have discussed this considerable increase in search engine traffic with several SEO professionals. It seems the general belief is that I was being penalised by Google, NOT because I offered dofollow links; but because too many of those links pointed to what SEO professionals refer to as ‘bad neighbourhoods.’
In other words, people were linking to dubious sites from here and I was being penalised by search engines for allowing it.
I believe that this problem can be rectified, by manually checking the URL’s of every link left by every person who comments. However, this blog has around 4000 comments – one post alone has almost 700 comments (and growing!) The large number of comments on this blog, made it just too time consuming for me to manually check the URL destination of each comment. Yes, there is software out there which is supposed to be able to do this for you, but I found it to be way too inaccurate – often claiming great blogs were spammy and visa versa.
Conclusion
Just offering dofollow links shouldn’t have any negative impact on a blog – providing you have the time to be able to manually check out the URL of every person who comments on your blog AND you are able to correctly identify what is a good or bad neighbourhood.
This causes a REAL dilemma though. That’s because the temptation is to delete any comment from someone, with a link that you are not 100% sure about. This inevitably means you run the risk of deleting comments from great, genuine people.
Dofollow clues
There’s an old saying in marketing, which tells us; “success leaves clues.” So, this weekend, I checked out the 50 most successful blogs that I read and NONE of them offer dofollow comment links. By the way, these include; scobleizer.com, chrisbrogan.com, problogger.com, copyblogger.com as well as techcrunch, mashable, ducttapemarketing.com and veronica belmont’s blog.
Over the past 6 months, my dofollow experiment has been really interesting. My conclusion is that dofollow is a GREAT idea, if you have the time to check out the URL of every comment and the ability to call it right each time.
If you only get a few comments a day and can afford the time to check them out – Go for it! However, if you get a lot of comments to your blog and you want to avoid a lot of extra work, I think you have a call to make.
Ironically, the dofollow benefits you give your commenters will make very little difference to their SEO anyway.
This post covers my unique, personal experience with dofollow links. I would like to hear your experiences with dofollow links or nofollow links. What kind of impact did they have on your blog; positive or negative?
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Hey Jim. I think you were real ballsy to make such a high profile blog do-follow.
Thanks for sharing your results.
SandPiper,
Thanks for your kind words.
Marketing is all about testing and measuring. This experiment was just that, an opportunity to test something and then measure the results. I have read a lot about blogs with dofollow links and the information is VERY conflicting. No doubt, someone will comment here shortly with a totally different experience of offering dofollow.
It also wasn’t that ‘ballsy’ as I have no advertising or sponsors here – It’s blog’s just a place to share free stuff with people who are interested in marketing and social media.
I offer dofollow links on my blog. However, I do manually select which comments are worth allowing the follow. When I first elected to do this though, I noticed an increase in spam. But after I started selecting which comments to “dofollow” and which not to, the spam it decreased. Let’s keep in mind that my blog doesn’t get that many comments just yet. So if the amount of comments increases, I might take it the plugin down. I sometimes comment on blogs but I don’t check if the blog is dofollow or not. I think people that appreciate what you have to say will comment if the find a post helpful regardless.
Hello Mario,
Thanks for the feedback.
I had a setting on my blog, which only made comments dofollow after the person’s second comment. This helped a little, but essentially it was just way too time consuming for me. I am also not convinced that it really helps others as much as they think.
Jim, thanks for sharing these results.
Obviously comment spam (from humans) is a huge problem. Sadly, I wish there was a better answer because to Google nofollow comments links says that “the community” around my blog is worth zero to me”.
I think this can be fixed in 3 ways:
1) Google can either implement a “commentfollow” value that is worth far less than a dofollow OR at least understands that the site’s owner is not responsible for it.
2) Google can follow *all* links, and then figure out overtime if they’re they really should be nofollow. Large media companies often cite blogs with nofollow links, and frankly it sucks (I don’t even have a blog, so I’m saying it sucks philosophically not personally). If NYT or WSJ reference a site repeatedly, Google should figure out that there’s some value there.
3) Requiring something like Disqus (or perhaps Facebook Connect eventually) can provide a reputation system. In this sense the writer (be it the blogger or the commenter) each get to own there own content. This is what Trackback was supposed to do, but didn’t quite work out. So if someone spams across sites or is just Sleezy Marketing Douchebag, his aggegrated Disqus account *becomes* the bad neighborhood, not your site.
I can’t say that this is the way Disqus actually works right now, I’m just saying it’s a logical next step.
So I think it was good of you to try that experiment. Likewise as someone who just spent 20 minutes writing this, I’d like to get some “credit” for contributing my thoughts. I *could* write this on my own blog (which isn’t set up yet, probably because I’m busy leaving comments on other sites) and then Trackback to yours, but then you get the whole annoying Trackback spam issue.
Still for a healthy ecosystem to evolve, I think we need a reputation system where users’ identities span the web, and those users get credit for what they contribute, and Google or Disqus or both have an opportunity to step up to the plate to make this happen.
-Sean
Sean,
Thanks for such a detailed comment. You make a lot of very interesting points.
I personally would like to see your second option. I agree that’s it’s wrojg to punish peple for siply wanting to help their reader. If Google followed all the links by default, but used the same ’scoring’ part of its algorithm to decide whether or not to give any link love to the sites that it already believes to be in a good or bad neighbourhood.
Hi,
Very Interesting experiment you made. But it seems to me little confusing, Plz don’t think I neglect your experiment. But comment-link is one type of backlink. If google treat it as link farming then what should we do??
Jim,
Thanks for the great post. The concept of DoFollow has been around for quite some time but seems to be garnering an increased awareness in SEO circles as well as web development.
I hear you on the impact to search engine results. I too have found that when allowing links that are pointing to inappropriate sites that I was penalized.
Today, I’m very careful about choosing which comments to post – especially those containing back links. I think the key is trying to determine what feedback is genuine and what feedback is done for purposed of link building.
Some interesting pints there. Thanks for the comment.
I really agree with Fitzroy that external links from readers comments need to be addressed in accordance with an intermediate service such as facebook connect or a similar facebook application. It may eventually put some use back into social networks like facebook which are now over run and present clouded or unrealistic presentations of their users.
This is the great idea of providing Do Follow links.your experiment succeeded and that is the most needed thing for client to have a do follow link.
Thanks for having a nice article post.
Hey Jim,
Thanks for the great post. I do quite a bit of work online and have also experimented with the dofollow tag. One one of my sites I maintain a pretty carefully controlled links page. I’ve tried to keep the number under 40 active links on average.
At one point in time, I wanted to see what would happen if I changed my robots.txt file to no follow vs. do follow. Within about 48 hours, my organic rankings on the page dropped significantly. I don’t know all the technical details behind it, but I do know that it have a negative impact from a search engine optimization perspective. As a result, I reinstated the “do follow” command.
I think the point about DoFollow v NoFollow is that it somewhat levels the playground for those of us with smaller blogs. Basically we can moderate where a big blog can’t…
The elephant in the room is whether for various reasons (I’ve tried to argue here) smaller bloggers should basically avoid interacting with large bloggers and (for a number of reasons) stick with interacting with other smaller blogs who ARE DoFollow.
This I think is quite an interesting question…
PS You are a ’small’ blog aren’t you Jim? (-:
hi Jim
very deep experiment you have done.do follow links is very important for pr and traffic.
thanks for sharing
I think if you can add 5 links a day for 5 days a week the cumulitive value could take your site to a pr 4 or 5 in about 6 months at least that is what my model says. I hope I am right because I am just starting out. I like trhe idea here of sticking to smaller bloggers but wonder if Google cares. I will try both large and small for now. Thanks Cris
The solution to your problem is very simple by doing something similar that I do: The first two comments that someone adds are moderated. Thus, if someone is spam-like (which I can gauge inside of 30 seconds), the comment is not approved. Nine times out of ten, it’s a non-issue and I click the “approve” link in my Wordpress dashboard.
I also think it’s ridiculous to look at what so-called top bloggers are doing because frankly they may be unaware.
This blog’s already moderated in that way.
But isn’t the root cause of the whole do follow issue :
How do you get a new blog noticed, read and commented on by people without it taking years?
It’s OK for those folks with long standing blogs and online presence..
There’s almost this pseudo science to SEO and I’m sure there has to be a better way hmm..
What is the point in creating articles if no one reads them? At the end of the day there has to be some “reward” for the investment of your time. For some people this may be money for others the postive comments of readers…
David´s last blog ..Nexus One Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)
Brilliant comment David – Lots of great points. Thanks!
Hi !!
First, Thanks for sharing this result. I’ve got a lot of information here…
I also want to share my experience.
My site wasn’t a do follow site, but I had enough traffic everyday, and that made me happy..But some of them commented me with just an URL which was broken link. And that made my PR down from 3 to 2. And that made me depressed. So for a long time I don’t care about my site anymore.
But now I think I can’t do that. I start to increase my PR again.. But it didn’t make any changes. So won’t my site’s PR increase again ??