Online Marketing Tactics — DoFollow or not DoFollow?
Posted in Uncategorized on November 5th, 2009 by fubarrioIn this post, I’m going to talk more directly about some online marketing tactics versus high level strategy.
I usually stay away from talking about too many tactical details. They tend to bore or confuse a company’s decision makers and in the game of search engine optimization or seo, the tactics that will work today, often will become outdated, stop working, or worse, counter-productive as the search engines change their algorithms to provide better results to their users.
Although I purposely don’t “seo” my corporate site, I decided to use this site in a controversial, ‘real time’ experiment, and report the results to you here as they happen.
As it so happens, my corporate site is a virtual ‘unknown’.
To whit: In the last week, I’ve gotten four (count ‘em, FOUR) visitors to my site 
The site is indexed by google, but it has a pagerank of zero, and an alexa rank of 26,374,163. In the world of the web, that just North of non-existent.
So, let’s talk about the ‘Test’
It’s ‘common knowledge’ in web circles that you want to get as many incoming links to your site as possible and reduce the amount of “link juice” that flows out of your pages through outgoing links. This has created a trend towards common blogging software and other content management packages automagically appending all outgoing links with the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
The “nofollow” attribute is an attempt to stop “link juice” from being passed where you don’t want it passed. Savvy web developers and Internet marketers attempt to “shape” their link weight by external and internal linking schemes designed to increase the weight of a given page.
I am going to fly in the face of convention and make this site’s blog postings accept comments with followable links. In other words, outgoing links in comments that pass link juice out.
While more knowledgable search marketers will tell you that even outgoing links on a page will help with relevance and theming, the challenge here will obviously be trying to carve and theme the links when it’s a veritable free for all.
By doing this, I”ve joined the nascient DoFollow link-love community.
In executing this ‘test’ we’ll be watching my traffic flow, alexa rank (which has some flaws as the sample is skewed) and my pagerank (which is a dreadfully lagging indicator).
Now, of course, this isn’t a great “test”. The reason is, of course, I’ve got no ‘Control’. Well designed testing would have a control of sorts. The reason is, the mere fact that I am creating a post to report on the ‘results’ will effect the results to some degree.
However, I’m too lazy at this stage to create a side-by-side example of www.corporateraiter.com with the same word-count, incoming link count & quality, and posting schedule. I’d need to take great pains to have identical keyword counts and avoid duplicate content between the two sites. Not to mention, one site would have a greater URL age, etc.
All that considered, I will run the ‘test’ and be reporting on the results here, including any frustrations or impossiblities that arise out of telling the world that this is the comment spammer’s version of nirvana.
I hope my experiences will help some others decide whether accepting outgoing links on their comments and joining the DoFollow revolution is right for them.
Interestingly, I found your site BECAUSE it is dofollow! But I guess considering the content of your site, it makes sense.
All of this SEO stuff is confusing, specially when you have all of these blogs online telling you different things… do this, do that…
I guess the only real way to find out is to experiment and do things yourself and see how they work out- like you are doing here.
Good for you! Id like to see how this turns out for you in the future…
I too found your site while searching for dofollow information. I enjoyed reading your article and will check back and see the results of this experiment.
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I like the sprite of the blog and the content is very strong, this post is very helpfull for the those peoples who are searching for the Search engine Optimization system for do follow blogs, so that way I recommended them to utilized this blog, to get some good traffic.
So, some guy with a site in Kuwait (or someplace) put my site on some list of sites that allow dofollow links. So, i keep getting these random messages from the middle east. I’m guessing these are all quite spamarific so I’ve been pushing most anything not in English to spam.
Ironically, or maybe not, the doofus who put a link to my blog as one that allowed dofollow links, did it with a nofollow link
ok, so time to do a little update.
the post i put up is a little over a week old. i now get about 6 visitors per day..a lot of these are coming from a dofollow directory or two — mostly guys that are looking to get some link juice back to their own pages i’m sure. but, this post and this site is really about online marketing, so it’s ‘all good’.
google pagerank has a serious lag, and it needs a lot more incoming link juice before that is going to effect this page, but the site has been ‘discovered’ by alexa and jumped from 26 million something to an alexa rank of 2.8MM
hahahaha….still in the ‘land of the lost’ obviously, but i may take the time to add it to a few more dofollow directories and see what happens.
more later.
Wow great tool, thanks for writing this! One thing I could suggest, is to have an option like “show posts with search term in title”…don’t know if this would be possible
I use both do-follow and no-follow directories in my online promotion. Why? – Because in this way I’m able to take the most advantage of search engine juice for my websites.
For exampple, I use one no-follow article directory especially when I need to get to the first page of Google for a certain keyword phrase.
Probably the best thing to do is moderate all the blog comments if you want to have a theme. I saw your site, because its a do follow.
While no follow don’t pass on link juice, they do help associate your anchor text. For the sake of SEO most marketers are looking for any possible ways to create traffic to their website and posting comments on do follow blogs is one thing. For me, I’d go for do follow and mix it with a little no follow.
interesting insights from my fellow marketeers here and in my other post.
i have a lot more to say on the theme of online marketing in general. specifically, i’m getting ready to launch a couple of new businesses that will be doing a healthy portion of their marketing and sales online.
if at all possible i intend to blog about their trials and tribulations here for others to use as a guidepost insofar as what to-do and what not to do.
by way of update, my alexa rank broke under 2MM — just barely — 1.988 MM
still completely invisible to the internet community, but it is interesting to note how easily the vast majority of pages were passed up. this will/would of course get a lot harder the higher i tried to push it.
I set my blog site to ‘dofollow’ status two weeks ago. It seems to have encouraged more comments and has slightly improved traffic.
Would love to hear how this has worked for others.
Thanks!
MAS
As do follow helped attract all of us here, it must be used. If a % come back and read the other posts its done its job, right!
All blogs should be dofollow! (As long as they are policed effectively). If people provide legitimate comments reinforcing a post’s content then why shouldn’t the writer be rewarded with some link love! After all, the site owner believes the content (post) is good enough for their webpage.
With regards to “dofollow” being a catalyst for more traffic, yes this is certainly the case, but at what cost? what is the quality of the traffic coming to your site? Spammers wanting links by writing “Nice Post”?? or “assaaa” (above) writing about a non existent tool that you’ve created…
assaaa:
“Wow great tool, thanks for writing this! One thing I could suggest, is to have an option like “show posts with search term in title”…don’t know if this would be possible”
Writing good quality content will always prevail in terms of getting the visitors you want. And policing your comments will mean people have no choice but do write something of value, or they will not get their views posted.
Great info. Your article is very good structured and has good info on dofollow. I recomand it to everybody.
Regards!
I would say that the results of going dofollow — ok and a very very little bit of linkbuilding — have been pretty incredible.
I now register a pagerank of 1 (the lowest other than zero) and my alexa ranking (which seems like the most inaccurate measure ever…but nonetheless…is at 1,062,194.
It’s a bit crazy cuz I’ve done very little in the way of posting or linkbuilding for this site.
My traffic is still very light and mostly made up of people trying to get a backlink to their site at all costs — which is ok because my site is not really for commercial purposes. If you have a commercial site that does something OTHER than webmarketing you may want to be a lot more picky about whose links you allow so as not to go ‘off theme’ too badly, or keep the dofollow in one area or around one directory or grouping of posts…i’m not sure how that would be accomplished without editing an existing dofollow template though.
more later, including a big announcement if i ever break 1MM on alexa
r8r
[...] guess it’s about time to do an official update to my original “DoFollow” [...]
I am doing online business and doing great since 6mths.Your topic really helpful to me for bringing more traffic and to reduce alexa.I will try to follow your thread and will inform you after implementation.Your experience is really inspiring topic for us and we will have to take it seriously.Thanks for sharing such a important article.
The nofollow vs dofollow testing has gone on and will go on for years to come. I believe that you need a balance of the two types of links pointing at your site to have a good SEO strategy in place. SEO is an interesting game and can change on a weekly basis. So you must keep your ear to the ground!
Your blog is really informative and you have nicely written for which everyone need to appreciate you.Your experience is really become one of the great resource for me.Thanks for it.I will try my best to recommend everyone this blog with the hope of useful to all.
Nice post, and good topic.
Thx for the information you’ve post.
I’m very enjoyed visiting and reading you’r blog, coz you’r post always uptodate.
Thx.
Interesting discussion as i actually closed my do follow comments due to the amount of spam it was attracting. But with traffic being a key requirement it is interesting how yours has increased since switching to do follow. Are you still seeing a regular growth in your traffic levels?
I was searching for a dofollow blog in search engine and found your blog. And your article is very nice. Keep it up….
well a very intresting topic b/c i recently start do follow …..& i m hoping get the desire result on that…..thx for the article
I am of your mind it is really very good, informative and nice blog. Thanks a lot for sharing it. I am also doing some research in this field.
Wow it is so mysterious, fabulous and mind blowing post! I liked the story and I will share it with my friends, I think they will lied it so much as I did. I think so it is good place to gain a lot of knowledge as much as more experience from such type of educational Blogs. Indeed I gave the link to you blog to some of them and they are now your constant readers. Thanks for sharing and I hope you will be here for giving us more information in the future. Once again thanks for cooperation…
Outstanding information!
I admire the valuable information that you share here that will be beneficial for my learning experience.
Thanks for informative post
Keep up!
The unique value a business offers to its customers. It’s why your customers will want to do business with you.
Knowing your value proposition is key to many steps you’ll take while you’re establishing the business, in your day-to-day activities and when it comes time to expand your business or borrow money.
I am new in the field of marketing and online marketing tactics is very much essential for me to have better result.Your site contain a many useful information. I look for a lot of this experience.Thanks for sharing such informational thoughts.
Do follow blogs offer people the chance to get backlinks, so what you are doing s well appreciated thanks for this article
Do follow is good for blogs that are targeted to webmasters as then you get targeted traffic. For a blog that does not appeal to webmasters then it isn’t useful. In a small enough niche they can just guest post and get a benefit.
If I ever start an internet marketing blog then I will make it do-follow.
I think you will get good traffic from people searching for do follow links (like myself) for SEO purposes, but surely there must be a limit to what it can do for your site? Maybe you should get some google ads on your site and encourage users to click on it to help you out in return for your services
@ vancouver movers…
yeah, for sure, this site in and of itself is a ‘non profit’—meaning i make no money at it!
but, truth be told it’s really not the intention of this site to make money. if it was you’d see all kinds of crazy monetization techniques being employed. this is merely a place to jot down some ideas that may (or may not
) help someone, and give them an added benefit of being able to slam out a comment and get some link juice.
one of the things i wanted to do was see how making a blog ‘dofollow’ rather than the ‘nofollow’ default affected the blog’s ranking in google, etc.
ciao for now,
fb
I totally agree with your blog.Main thing required for online business is creativity.Marketing can’t be done well without creative mind.So always we should focus on our target goal for achieving success.I like your blog and hats off to you for such useful blog.I am going to bookmark it.
online promotion is a great way to introduce new products on the market.;~`
online promotion is a great way to introduce new products on the market.~,’
SEO work is so confusing. I read multiple blogs on a daily basis each one saying something different. I am still trying to work out the DoFollow stuff for myself but like everyone else I see it working so we keep trying to follow it.
Thanks fubarrio for trying your best to make seo professional understand the tactics of dofollow or no follow. But I think your should elaborate a little bit more with example which will be easy to understand.
alright…i’ll bite on the automated ‘bot called ‘angelina….what is UV paint? here is your chance to tell us about your offering…fill it with links…whatever.
Thanks for sharing this,… Nice post for “follow” and “no follow” stuff..
online promotion seems to be a fast way to make your products and services to be known”`*
online promotion is a very cool job, you are always looking for online customers~’.
online promotion also takes some time just like offline promotion. it is just that online promotion is a bit faster compared to-~,
I am glad you chose to have dofollow links. It has more advantages than disadvantages. Search Engine Optimization is quite difficult to execute. Like the previous comment said, you have to experiment to find out the right technique for you.
“Hi, thanks for this tips. I just have bit questions about dofollow backlinks. Is it true that when you comment on the post with 100 comments on it, backlinks will be no use. Is that so.
Really hard to find where I can post a do follow blog. I want to reward my readers for their comments, this in turn helps imprve my traffic as visitors return knowing links will be provided back to their site, theoretically improving my ranking by gaining additional web traffic. My site is on blogger, and despite folowing the online tips to remove the no follow links they do not work. You can remove the no follow tag from the main body of your blog, but comments are always no follow as blogger gives no place for editing or removing the no follow tag to comments. Any pointers greatly appreciated. Arnold from West Bridgford
Our webspider saw that your site is dofollow. We just launched the first wordpress dofollow search engine and we have added your blog. This will will bring some visitors. You have our adress on our name on this commnent. We will be very thankful if you will help us too a hand in promoting it by adding our url somewhere on your blog.
no problem…i’ll add you to the list of dofollow stuff on my site.
Nice info. It attracts more users when it’s do-follow. It’s obvious
It is always nice to help fellow developers so i would def make mine a do follow, why not?
dofollow or nofollow definitely be there are advantages and disadvantages, the disadvantages are the spam, that if you leave the blog loses credibility.
Online marketing is much more popular now a days.Dofollow or NoDofollow both are important from SEO point of view.Learn a lot from your article about SEO.Thanks for the nice work.Looking forward for the next update coming.
صور السيارات…
[...]Corporate Raiter » Blog Archive » Online Marketing Tactics — DoFollow or not DoFollow?[...]…
Yes , I have gotten a right new from them.
I use both do-follow and no-follow directories in my online promotion. Why? – Because in this way I’m able to take the most advantage of search engine juice for my websites.
For example, I use one no-follow article directory especially when I need to get to the first page of Google for a certain keyword phrase. Premature Baby Clothing
W
This one has got my sight by the quality of the work and for it nice tittle.Thanks for the great sharing with the great clearance.Hope to find some more update here.Keep it up here.
Great article! That is the kind of info that are meant to
be shared around the web. Disgrace on Google for now not positioning this post upper!
Come on over and discuss with my site . Thanks =)