In a recent post, Jeet’s guest post entitled “Get some Comment Love for your static website” sparked quite a bit of discussion, and raised the issue between NoFollow and DoFollow blogs.
As many of you might have realized (noting the massive image we have on the sidebar) that Blogussion was made a DoFollow blog several weeks ago. This decision, undoubtedly came with its own benefits and downfalls, but it was a result of critical thinking and past experiences.
Relatively speaking, it’s almost 50-50 when it comes to bloggers going DoFollow or NoFollow. Even though almost every blogger seems to have their biased opinion on the issue, there is a handful of minority that aren’t aware of the great differences.
I want to re-raise the debatable issue between NoFollow and DoFollow blogs, and just share with you my opinion; grounded by several key facts..
What is NoFollow?
Wikipedia: Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.
To put it in simple terms; NoFollow is an HTML attribute that is assigned to a hyperlink that instructs the search engine crawler that the targeted page should not be awarded with a SERP boost.
Most search engines, including Google, rank web-pages using several algorithms and one of them being; how many in-links a certain page has from external sources.
There is a pretty simple reason behind this algorithm. The more in-links you have to your web-page, it’s a clear indication that you have useful content. Search Engines use the number and quality of your in-links to assign you a rank within search results.
NOTE: The tag “DoFollow” is not a real tag or ALT attribute, because it is non-existent. If a link doesn’t contain the ‘Nofollow’ attribute then it is automatically deemed to be a ‘Dofollow’ link.
Why Should You Care?
If you run a self-hosted Wordpress blog, you might know this but all your links are made nofollow by default. You might not want to play around with the default settings, but after reading the following points – you might be change your mind.
Not only for Wordpress users, but every webmaster should decided whether to leave a blog NoFollow or make it DoFollow. They are obvious traffic, SEO and even social benefits and downfalls of both attributes – but to make your choice a bit more clearer, I will run through the Pros/Cons of both.
Making Your Blog NoFollow
Pro: Untrusted Content
If you need to link to a certain site that doesn’t seem very trustworthy and genuine, you can attach the NoFollow tag to prevent spammers from picking up on your website. Think of it this way – every page you link to means you are recommending that site to someone else. Assign it a NoFollow tag and you are effectively telling the crawler “This site and mine have nothing to do with each other”
Pro: Paid Links
As you all know, Google penalizes paid links unless they are NoFollow. If you want to sell ad-space on your blog; make sure it has the NoFollow tag or else you will be penalized for breaching Google TOS. Not only Google, but this applies to several other key search engines.
Pro: Preserve Link Juice
By assigning NoFollow tags to all your external links, you are effectively preserving link juice within your website. By keep the “link juice” in circulation of your site, you can help yourself to attain a higher PageRank.
Pro: Prioritize Your Links
Do you really want the search engine crawler visiting your login/registration pages? What about your Disclaimer and Terms of Use? There really isn’t any point for the crawler to visit these pages, so by assigning NoFollow tags to these in-links you can save both time and bandwidth.
Con: You Lose Blog Activity
By adding the NoFollow attribute, you will almost certainly discourage comments, especially from the link-savvy. This is one of the biggest let-downs of NoFollow blogs, but if you can implement the tag subtly and as sparingly as possible; you might just get away with this!
Con: Destroys the fundamentals of Hyperlinking
When you link to an external source using a hyperlink, you are inevitably sharing that site’s content with your readers and guests. The basic fundamental behind hyperlinks is to “spread the word” but by sticking in a NoFollow tag you are indirectly breaking this tender bond. A lovely quote from LeftBlank was;
“…with these ‘nofollow’ tags a search engine will simply ignore those links, potentially rendering them unfindable on the web.”
Making Your Blog DoFollow
Pro: Encourages Comments
Many webmasters scout around for DoFollow blogs to leave comments because it is the easiest way to get back-links. This can encourage many bloggers/website owners to leave comments on your blog in an effort to earn some extra back-links
Pro: Make use of Top Commentators & CommentLuv
These plugins are two of my favorites because it really gets the community going. When someone takes the time to reply to your posts, why shouldn’t you reward them with some spotlight credit? In my humble, and non-factual opinion – I think without DoFollow tags, these two plugins are pretty useless.
Pro: Awesome Marketing Point
If you can afford to make your blog DoFollow – you can really use it as a marketing point. By telling people and by showing off your site is DoFollow; you can attract some visitors that might turn out to be some nice conversions.
Con: Encourages Spam
DoFollow blogs are loved by lifeless spam bots. This can be a very irritating aspect of making your blog DoFollow because even though you are trying to reward your commentators, I can almost guarantee that your comment-moderation will multiply by several folds!
Con: Sacrifice Your Authority
If you start handing out DoFollow links to every person/bot and gust of wind that comes by your blog – your authority as a blogger might soon evaporate. Maintain a sense of dignity and be selective in who you reward 
Con: Leak Link Juice
In theory, you are pretty much handing out PageRank and link juice to every link that hasn’t got a NoFollow tag. This is really generous of you, but you might feel a bit used and actually suffer from a SEO perspective.
Final Say.
Here are Blogussion, Alex and I have agreed to keep our blog DoFollow. It was almost an instantaneous decision without much though because we value our community over SEO and organic traffic. For us, our guests and commentators that take part in our discussions means a lot more than a stream of traffic.
So, most external links on our blog is DoFollow and we have both the above mentioned plugins. We have already experience a bit of a SEO hit, where we were assigned only a PageRank 2 even though we have in excess of 7.000 in-links, even a few from PR4-5 websites.
Quite frankly, we aren’t worried about it one bit. It has really helped grow our community and we are thankful for that! This does not mean it will work for you and your blog. Take into consideration every point I’ve stated above and come to an informed decision.
A balance of DoFollow and NoFollow links usually work the best, but it takes a lot more management. If you have the time – I would recommend you carefully examine the majority of your links on your website and assign them appropiate ALT attributes.
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@Janith: A well written post. A quick point about Pros of making the blog dofollow. A lot of people publish dofollow blog lists and there are dofollow blog directories as well. A dofollow blog can get many more links this way.
You have written ‘and’ twice in succession in one of the sentences.
I keep my blogs dofollow and encourage others too.
Jeet’s last blog post..Free Directory List
Whoops! Thanks for pointing that about Jeet – amended appropriately
Also, that’s a point I forgot too! There’s almost nearly a million “DoFollow” lists out there, and you can get included in most of them quite easily; all the more promotion for free
Thanks for the input Jeet, appreciate it
There are lots of confusion regarding dofollow and nofollow rel in links !! thanks for nice guide !!
I personally suggest let the Top commentator widget be working on your blog and the commentators link be nofollow !!
Abhishek’s last blog post..Still Following Idle Twitter user?
That’s a great way of balancing out the dofollow/nofollow links on your blog. From what I’ve heard Google favors neither for any particular reason, but a balance between the two is “optimal”
I use Do Follow for my blogs. I feel its the least I can do for a commenter.
But i use this plugin that enables do follow for only people with x no. of comments. So only a loyal commenter get the love
Farrhad A’s last blog post..farrhad: The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself. ~ Oscar Wilde #quote
That sounds like an awesome plugin Farrhad! Care to share with us the name of it?
Lucias Linky Love is the name of one of the plugins that does what Farrhad said; it’s the one I use.
There are a few points that should be clerer for beginners here:
If you run a self-hosted Wordpress blog, you might know this but all your links are made nofollow by default.
Note this is only with comments. Any other contextual links (links within posts) are the opposite; inherently do follow until the no follow attribute is included.
with these ‘nofollow’ tags a search engine will simply ignore those links, potentially rendering them unfindable on the web.
At best this is misleading. No follow links are STILL indexed, they just don’t pass link juice (PR).
There are still many good reasons, some of which you mentioned nicely, to use no follow links. And remember, at the current time, Google is the only SE that cares one way or the other…they may be dominant, but don’t close out the others altogether.
A great post all in all.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..798 Views & 5 Comments – Are You Doing All You Can To Engage Them?
First of all, thank you for your input + plugin’s name Dennis, much appreciated!
My bad on the statement on the self-hosted Wordpress blogs, that was completely my fault for not making it clear. Thank you for pointing it out, and I will amend the post to make it clearer.
About the no-follow links being indexed, are you sure? I have never come across a definite answer to this and have always puzzled me :S
I know Google doesn’t show most of the back links to your site using site:domain.com but I don’t think I’ve seen any no-follow- links on those searches; maybe I just haven’t been looking hard enough!
Thanks for pointing this out, you learn something new everyday
I’m as sure as I can be. The only thing Do/No follow has to do with is whether or not Google allows PR to be passed from page to page; that’s it.
Google is horrible with showing links though, you’re right on the money there.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Do You Charge For Blog Reviews?
Ahh sweet, thanks for giving the heads up Dennis!
Appreciate it
Google is slack on showing the links no doubt, for whatever the reason is. But I’ve seen a couple of threads emerging over at DigitalPoint saying that Google’s started to show all links; but not from what I’m seeing at the moment..
Even though I’ve never really had to make this decision, I would most deffinitely go with DoFollow rather than NoFollow. It’s just better for the community overall. Sure you have to fight frequent spam and such, but you get more site acitivty. Personally, it just sounds better to me!
Wonderful post Janith!
I’ve seen many people complain about the extra spam, but Akismet blocks most of them! Sure there was an increase in the number of spam comments since we made it DoFollow but we never allocated time to “fight spam”, this beautiful plugin does it for us.
However, it blocks out some legitimate comments because of the CommentLuv link, so we have to keep an eye out for it
On my blog i olny give no-follow links to the top commentators i think i will have to change it to give everyone do follow links. I also give back with a link directory and a social bookmarking site where you can spread your link. The out going links are probably killing my serps. But my blog was made to give back to the community and that’s what i am doing with it.
Any way i think that at least you should reward the top commentators with a follow link
Online Marketing Blog’s last blog post..Free Advertising for your Web site?
Fair enough comment, but I wouldn’t go as far as saying “killing my SERPs” because unless you have 100+ out-bound links on every one of your pages; it won’t make any drastic SERP changes.
I see where your coming from, because no-matter what; you will suffer from even the slightest SERP drop because of the out-bound links but it can be much more rewarding in other ways
TopCommentators in my opinion should always get a DoFollow back-link as a token of “thank you” because they are contributing the most to your blog. Other links, such as post links and every comment’s link can be made no-follow without too much hesitation.
Interesting points to consider. I’ll have to give dofollow some more thought when I start up my next blog
Most definitely Random!
I think it’s one of the most underrated “questions” when running a blog but quite ironically it’s a question that tends to do some people’s head in.
The pros and cons are pretty evenly matched if you take a non-biased view on it, so some bloggers tend to “over-think” about it :O
Hi,
Thank you for pointing out the pros and cons of do follow blogs and no follow blogs. For me the quality of the content is very vital and it is very important that we give value to the readers and the commentators who’s taking time to comment on our blogs.
Jennifer Eden Cruz’s last blog post..Highly Effective Search Engine Optimization Strategies Part 1
Hey Jennifer,
Thank you your comment and also for dropping by a comment
From what is important to you, I’ll definitely recommend going with DoFollow because all-in-all it’s better for building your blog’s community!
Good luck with your blog!
I’ve always been a big fan of making a blog DoFollow but I am really starting to think that it may hurt your SEO in the long run. It will definitely attract more comments but I am wondering if they are really worth it? It depends on your goals I suppose but how important is getting lots of comments in the grand scheme of things??
Online Income’s last blog post..Link Building Checklist
Lets break it down a litte…
1. An active blog will attract more activity (constant comments and regular commenters).
2. An active blog attracts potential advertisers.
Now for the biggie #3. Something that so many bloggers don’t realize or think about…
Comments = Content the same way the actual articles do. Look at my comment count (widget lower right); I’m as sure as I can be that all that content helped in the process of going from a PR2 to PR3 in the last Google dance.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Do You Accept Guest Posts? Get Your Name On The List
It really does depend on your personal goals, just as you’ve mentioned.
However the blow you get from a SEO perspective is very minimum unless your top commentators show the top 100! Also, if you break your comments per post into pages, so after “X Comments” you get to go to the next page of comments, you can pretty much eliminate the “SEO Downfall” as a whole of making your commentators a link.
Crawlers only flag your site if you have too many outbound links (DoFollow) on a single page, so if the top commentators say about 5, and comments are broken into pages every 20 comments = that’s only 25 out-bound per page, which is well below the Google’s unofficial guideline of 100.
Yeah , Dofollow have its own pros and cons . You can’t expect that you can get everything without doing hard work . If you want high traffic then you need to be ready to handle Spammers too . Most of the bloggers say that we need high traffic But can’t make blog do-follow as it would increase SPAM that won’t helps all .
One more point that only Google support No-follow . other search engines still count no-follow links .
Feel free to catch me at twitter .created new account there http://twitter.com/gagankalra
I honestly feel that as a blogger, you should be more worried about your users than the search engines. Sure, search engines can bring in a lot of your human visitors, but I feel that you should make it a priority to reward your current users with a good DoFollow backlink. Just an opinion, but I’ve always said Humans > Spiders!
Well said man, couldn’t have put it better myself
I love the “humans > spider” I’m a strong believer in that too =D
I use dofollow on top commentator links, however I am pretty sure I have it set to nofollow for all around comments. I might change that though, on previous blogs I have owned dofollow links got me more comments.
WPThemeKid – Daniel’s last blog post..Eating Out WP Theme Release!
DoFollow on the top-commentator is almost “compulsory” or it defeats the whole purpose of having one. I think a good balance would be to make top-commentators – dofollow and all around comments; nofollow.
That’s the best for “balance” but here at Blogussion, we value our participants way more than a heartless crawler
Not much to worry i say about making the website/blog No-follow. I have seen many popular websites implementing such a strategy.
There may be some people who don’t work much on this link generation. However there are always alternatives. One can use the book marking’s on their blogs/websites for making their website popular. Just work on good and quality content and make it flow around the web. Thats it. You are right on the button.
Cheers guy for this post
Krishna’s last blog post..Google announces – Ad Manager Certified Consultants Program
“DoFollow on the top-commentator is almost “compulsory” or it defeats the whole purpose of having one.”
Oh? I do believe the top commenter plugins existed long before the do follow plugins. I’d see the main purpose of TC to be link exposure…..to be do follow is a bonus/gravy/whipped cream (and a cherry if said blog is of exceptionally high PR).
Currently mine is no follow, but on every page. I find that far more conducive to the link then do follow only on the home page. Those that have it do follow and on every page really don’t mind massive leakage.
“I think a good balance would be to make top-commentators – dofollow and all around comments; nofollow.”
Now this is something I’ve been wondering myself.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..3 Secrets to Writing for the Search Engines
Hey,
You’re absolutely right. One of my blogs got a huge boost in traffic, because he changed to a Dofollow blog. But none of the traffic converts to anythings, so it’s really just a big waste. Unless a blogger carefully selects which links he allows.
Interesting as there doesn’t seem to be a “right” answer. Funny how this post is a vote for “do follow”, but is fair enough in its judgement that I’m almost inclined to make mine “no follow” after reading it.
Don Margolis’s last blog post..Stem Cell Research Helps Artist With His Arthritis-Video
But why?! The way I see it is that dofollow *should* get you more comments, and that can only be a good thing. Yes, you’ll probably see an increase in spam, but surely it’s worth the 10 minutes per day you spend moderating for all the extra comments?
Simon | Teenius’s last blog post..Staying Motivated To Earn Online
The new design looks great Alex..
I’d love to read about Social Media and SEO more and more.. then its your Blog, whtsoeva you write.. I am always there to read
Enk.’s last blog post..Post more ?
lol I’m sorry.. I was postnig the above Comment for the new design Post not here.. Sorry again !
Enk.’s last blog post..Post more ?
Is it true that if we sell ad-space on our blog with ‘DoFollow’ tag, than Google will penalized us ?
gudangmakalah’s last blog post..Top Quality Link
Do you mean text links? I know for a fact that selling text links will get you penalized by Google.
Let me know!
Any outbound link on the page, which was sold with the DoFollow tag will get penalized if (I mean when) Google finds you out.
Absolutely. Never sell ad-space or an outbound link with DoFollow attribute with it.
It’s only a matter of time before Google catches you out and penalize you – and no matter how big you are; you will get penalized.
A good example of this; is what happened to John Chow (who runs a blog with 70k+ followers), still he got penalized for selling DoFollow text links. He suffered greatly from SERPs and didn’t even rank for the search phrase “John Chow” which he consistently optimized for and is also the words of his domain URL.
Actually Chow was a whole ‘nother story and got what he deserved….
http://www.garryconn.com/the-day-after-john-chow-lost-to-google.php
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..How I Publish Guest Posts
Possibly part of the problem is the Dofollow plugin saying that it disables nofollow in comments, but actually it only disables the nofollow on the name field; any links left in the comment field are still nofollowed (or at least, such appears to be the case in our comments; I haven’t dissected the plugin to see what’s happening). I felt a bit annoyed by this when I first spotted it: I’d’ve liked a more accurate description of what the plugin did. So I’m sure any commenters who happened to spot it felt doubly annoyed.
That’s not a problem, that’s the purpose of the plugin. They never claimed to do more then follow the URL field itself. There aren’t too many legit reasons for links within comments anyway.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Understanding The New Rules Of SEO
Hi Janith,
This is a very informative article. Once I was going through some blog and they made mention to “do-follow” and “no-follow” and I had no idea what they were talking about. Thanks for shedding light on this issue. I have finally know how to differential the ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ stuffs, which this matter has annoyed me for a very long time.
hurraye…ee
I totally agree with the pros and cons of nofollow tags, however I guess as time goes by, it keeps losing its value and most search engine would simply by-pass it.
After reading your article, I’ve decided to stay with nofollow….at least for now. Having a new site, I think I will change over to dofollow after I have made a footprint a little more as far as visitor loyalty
You wrote: “…actually suffer from a SEO perspective.” Is that just page rank or actual search engine results? I ask because a large % of my traffic is from Google and I want to keep it that way. So in the future, if I did switch to dofollow, will that hurt my position in searches?
Thank you for your article, I have been going back and forth with the two for awhile now.
Amy Lynn’s last blog post..All You Magazine 1year subscription 10 bucks
Having dofollow is good in many cases, but of course forces the blog owner to watch comments more closely so that spam comments don’t come through.
pest’s last blog post..Rats out of control
I tried the dofollow plugin once and even though I only get a few dozen visitors a day to my blog, the spam went through the roof, I had to get rid of it.
I think there is a search engine that finds blogs that are dofollow.
I allow do-follow on my wordpress blogsites too.. i don’t care too much about PR because it will come up sooner or later as we all are building more natural links rather than artificial linking, and blogging is not as easy as many people think, like people say there are 180 million blogs, I dont’ think more than 70% is not making money or regularly updating..
do-follow all the way for me, PR will come up later, as long as we have good anti spam, anti bot scripts for commenting, I think i am doing alright.
cheers
Linn’s last blog post..Top 10 DoFollow Social Bookmarking Websites
Using “Do Follow” will spread the blog love but you need to set up an excellent comment and moderation policy because even spammers still spam nofollow blogs greatly!
Internet Marketing Blogs’s last blog post..Wolfram Alpha a new way of searching the net
I use dofollow on top commentator links, however I am pretty sure I have it set to nofollow for all around comments. I might change that though, on previous blogs I have owned dofollow links got me more comments.
shekhar´s last blog ..Easy ways to Get Banned from Google Adsense
Usually people are more likely to comment on blogs that have dofollow comments.
Do follow links are better as compare to no follow links, because in no follow links we restrict the google boot to go to the other website and index them, so do follow links are better as compare to no follow.
I think its a no brainer choice now to nofollow your links, especially when I read a matt cutts blog post a few months ago.
It basically said that if you have a number of links on your page that have the nofollow tag, the pagerank isn’t saved and flow to the follow links on the page.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
oral seymour´s last blog ..Apple and Palm still at it over the Pre’s Itunes Syncing
Hello. Thanks for sharing information about this controversial topic DoFollow VS NoFollow. And thank you very much for allowing DoFollow comments here.
In my comment above I made an error. I meant to say its a no brainer to remove the nofollow from your links.
oral seymour´s last blog ..Apple and Palm still at it over the Pre’s Itunes Syncing
There was a great confusion about do follow and no follow blogs. But thanks for the guidance.
rom the obvious to the “Hey-I-never-thought-of-that-great-idea-before”, here are 10 of the top 52 tips on how to optimize your website for its turbo-charge rocket ride up the search engine rankings.
safdar´s last blog ..seo optimization,seo,seo tips,seo marketing,
If I could make all the google adsense advertisers’ links as nofollow, that will be great!
scheng1´s last blog ..Alopecia: hair loss condition
where do you get that plugin?
Paul´s last blog ..Electronic Insect Repellent
hey thanks for the advice. I’ve been thinking about making my blog a dofollow for quite sometime and this post made me decide. anyway, I think I’ll stay with a no follow for awhile.
elie palima´s last blog ..How to change the nameservers | start a blog and make money – coaching videos step 3
if a blog is do follow.. all says like spamming occurs.. wen some one publish a blog.. they expect some comments for the article.. so accept the gud comments and reject low standard ones.. y bothering whr there guy doing seo or soemthing?? anybody agree???