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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The results are in and I can now let you know what’s happened since I started this exciting marketing experiment!

As many of you already know, jimsmarketingblog.com offers everyone who comments here a special reward; something called a do-follow link.  This is great for my readers, as it means when you comment here, your link actually tells Google to visit your website or blog; which can help boost your Search Engine Optimization.

Sadly, over 99% of blogs and almost every well-read blog, offers the exact opposite – they offer ‘no-follow links’; which tell Google NOT to follow the link to your website or blog.

The 2 main reasons people give for not offering do-follow links are as follows:

1. Google ‘penalise’ sites like mine, which offer them, by lowering our page rank.
2. Blogs offering do-follow links are more likely to be targeted by spammers, because links from do-follow blogs are so much more valuable to them.

So, what REALLY happens when you offer do-follow links?

I have seen no drop in traffic from Google. This blog’s only a few months old and it gets around 50 – 60 unique visitors each day via Google. When I started the experiment, I was getting around 40 a day. There are lots of reasons why this number has gone up – but for a very new blog that only posts a few times a week, that’s an ‘ok’ response from Google. I can’t see that I am being punished for offering the links; not yet anyway!

Spam? Well, 99.9% of the spam here is the kind of automated spam that every blog gets and it goes straight into the blog’s spam filter.  There has been no increase in this kind of spam at all.

Spam from people using my comments section to pimp their website/blog has increased very slightly – but mainly because spammers know how well read this blog is. They see posts with over 200 comments and that’s like a magnet for comment spammers.

Thus, I can say with a high degree of certainty that the blog has suffered no ill effects from Google or from spammers, because of my use of do-follow links!

So, I am going to keep offering them to you – every time you comment here!

Benefits of offering do-follow links?

There are a lot of very compelling reasons to offer do-follow links. If you look at the kind of comments I got here when I announced what I was doing, you will see how warmly it was welcomed by the online community.

This blog is all about developing a community, based around our mutual interest in marketing and social media. So, what better way to show my commitment to our community, than to reach out and help promote everyone who comments here?

I have also seen a massive surge in visitor numbers, RSS subscribers and in the number of people who contact me via jimsmarketingblog.com. I believe a big reason for this, is that people really embrace the concept of a blog that actually gives them something tangible every time they comment.

We live in an age where marketing and social media guru’s keep on talking about how important it is to connect and share – yet they do so behind blogs that deliberately tell Google NOT to visit YOUR website or blog!

I really like the phrase that’s used to describe do-follow links.  They call it Link Love. As we approach what is sure to be a very challenging year for small businesses in 2009, I hope more people reach-out to THEIR readers with links that are actually worth having.

Over to you!

So, what do you think about ‘Link Love?’  Do you find yourself more likely to comment on blogs that show they value your comments?  Do you offer link love to your readers already – if so, what has your experience been? Whatever your thoughts are, share them here (and get some Link Love too!!)

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