What is DoFollow and NoFollow? And how to use it to increase traffic.

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What is DoFollow and NoFollow? And how to use it to increase traffic.

By Gino J ⋅ May 7, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Recently I did some reading about quite a new topic for me: DoFolow and NoFolow. This is really good way to increace traffic to any website. So I decided to put all information I found in one place and write a post about this. If you would like to get more info about this you should check LinkBuildingBible.com and TheBlogFinder.com.

So in this post I will cover these topics:

What is DoFollow and NoFollow?
Why this is important?
DoFollow search engines.
Wordpress plugin: CommentLuv

What is DoFollow and NoFollow?

If you did some research on link building, when you’ve probably seen people mentioning “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. These are very important terms to understand when you are trying to build great links back to your site in order to increase your search engine rankings. But, to the person who is new to all this (as I was couple days ago) it may seem a bit confusing. No worries, I am going to break it down for you.

When you create a link on a webpage using HTML, the standard code is:

<a href=http://themilliondollarplan.net>The Million Dollar Plan</a>

It includes the HTML tag, the URL the link will be going to, the text that will be shown on the webpage for that link, and the closing HTML tag.

It is possible to add more HTML to the code above, to let the search engine spiders know whether or not you want them to follow the link when crawling your website. You may be thinking… “Why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my site?” This is a very valid concern, which I will address further down. First, I am going to show you how to modify the HTML in order to tell the search engine spiders to crawl a link or not.

To make search engine spiders crawl a link you don’t have to do anything. Simply use the link format shown above.
To tell search engine spiders to NOT crawl a link, you need to add following HTML code:
```
rel=”nofollow”.
```
So the link code then would look like this:
```
<a href=”http://themilliondollarplan.net” rel=”nofollow”>The Million Dollar Plan</a>
```

As you can see there is no true “dofollow”, it is just NOT using the “nofollow” tag.

Why this is important?

When you are using different methods in order to build links on other websites, you need to determine if the websites you are attempting to get your site listed on use the “nofollow” tag or not. If they do, it may still be a good idea to try to get that link there, but it is generally regarded as not the best use of time since the search engines don’t follow that link and you don’t get any increase in search engine rankings from that link.

Why would I use “nofollow”?

There are many reasons you would want to use the “nofollow” tag, such as:

1) Paid Links: This is recommended by Google. If you have a paid link on your site, it’s essentially buying a higher rank in Google. They don’t like that.

2) Blog’s comment section (if using most blog software, this is automatic). It is up to you if you want your commentators to get link back to their site. It is personal preference.

3) When linking to major, very popular sites. If you are linking to google.com, yahoo.com, digg.com (the front page), cnn.com, or whoever else, they are already popular, so you might as well use “nofollow” since your link won’t make or break them.

DoFollow search engines

Now when we all know that DoFollow really matters if we want to increase search engine rankings, the question is: what’s the easiest way to find these blogs? Sure we could simply look into source code and search for “nofollow”, but it’s not very productive. Luckily there are search engines available which make this process very easy. So here is some search engines and DoFollow Lists I’ve found:

DoFollowDiver

D-List

DoFollow, CommentLuv, KeywordLuv Blog List

DoFollow Searcher Tool

DoFollow List

Wordpress plugins: CommentLuv

DoFollow backlink is a great reward for a valuable comment because it helps improve the search engine position. But the comment allows a reader have only one backlink and this link may have the commentator’s name or nickname as the anchor text that doesn’t mean much for search engines.

So why not to reward the comment author with an extra link with more relevant keywords in the anchor text? This is an excellent way to promote the readers’ websites and this can be done automatically with the use of a particular plug-in. And that plugin is CommentLuv. The CommentLuv is a plugin for WordPress that will visit the RSS feed of the blog address the reader provided in the URL field, attempt to find the last post the reader made and display it under the comment giving the reader a great internal backlink to his/her website.

Example:

Now many WordPress blogs are applying the CommentLuv plugin. The bloggers understand that it gives the readers an extra incentive to leave a comment, encourages people to add to the conversation by giving something back right away.

How to search for blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin

You may be wondering how to find relevant blogs with the CommentLuv plugin enabled on which to comment on. The answer is simple – use Fast Blog Finder or Google and type the search query like below replacing “your keywords” with your real keywords:

"Enable CommentLuv" +"your keywords"

By adding your keywords at the end of the search query, you will reduce the large quantity of blogs to blogs relevant to your niche. You can also use some of these search options to narrow and refine your search results.

For example, if I want to find the blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin and are relevant to the “Online marketing” keywords, simply type in:

"Enable CommentLuv" +"Online marketing"

Keep in mind that not all blogs you will find in google will be “Dofollow”. You’ll have to double check for that.

Summarizing all this, it has to be said that using “DoFollow” and CommentLuv is a great way to increase blog trafic and search engine page rank. Help others and they will help you.

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