Blog Basics: DoFollow or NoFollow?
Here are three pearls of wisdom for you on blogging and your small business (or non-profit organization):
- If you are going to choose or start with only one form of social media, set up a blog.
- Whatever system you choose for your blog, keep it up-to-date. (side note: I had a Drupal installation that I wasn’t keeping up-to-date; yesterday it got hacked. Since I am not using it anyway, I just took it offline. Unless you are extremely technically-inclined, I don’t recommend Drupal for a small business blog – stick to WordPress).
- Links in comments in WordPress installations by default are nofollow.
Many of you may ask, what does that mean, that a link is nofollow? It means that when a search engine such as Google crawls your blog, it does not follow links that are labeled “nofollow.” Google explains: “those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.” You can see the nofollow tag if you look at the source code for a post on your site. It might look something like this:
Should you do anything about the nofollow tag? If you are just starting out, just leave it as is. After blogging for a while, you can read the pros and cons of changing the nofollow tag to dofollow (easiest way to do this is add dofollow plugin – I definitely DO NOT recommend directly changing your core WordPress code as some posts suggest).
As an experiment, I just changed this blog to dofollow – so if you are more inclined to leave a comment because this is a dofollow blog, then the experiment works. If you leave a link that has no relation to the post, your whole comment may be in danger of deletion. But you won’t do that, right?
Thanks to Hannah Katsman for coming up with the idea for this post.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Debra Askanase, Leora Wenger. Leora Wenger said: Blog Basics: DoFollow or NoFollow? http://bit.ly/7lxxbC – a post for beginning small business bloggers [...]
Thank you for explaining how this works. And I’m so glad I decided not to use Drupal.
Just out of curiosity, why are you glad?
Ah, a repeat comment from Jake! Thanks, Jake. (just for that I’m going to ask you what topics I should post about… what would you like to discuss…it seems to take me a week to come up with a good post…)
Now I realize you are asking Hannah why *she* is glad didn’t go with Drupal… I guess I will have to let her answer that one.
Thank, Leora, I missed that too!
Most serious bloggers use WP, so there is much more information and support out there. Not to mention practical tools like plugins just for bloggers. I have not come across many blogs that use Drupal.
Hi leoraw,
I think it will be easy using wordpress to make them do follow. There is some comment luv widget that help.
Nice blog.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday.
Thanks for your comment, LunaticG (great name). I think the comment luv widget does something else, leaving the most recent post under the comment (maybe I’ll play with that one or similar ones, too). The dofollow plugin I mentioned was simple to install.
Welcome to Dofollow network. I’m sure you will see rise in traffic and comments on your blog from now on.
As long as the commentator has something worthwhile to say. No point in leaving a “comment” just to get a link. I’m interested in intelligent conversation about the topic presented.
good explanation i choose do follow.. :)
It worked Leora. ;-)
I wrote an article that explained the importance of linking as well as the pros and cons of dofollow blogs.
My blog is dofollow, but with the WordPress plugin I use, Nofollow Case by Case, I can selectively turn links into nofollow.
Larry Brauner
Nofollow Case by Case sounds like a plugin that could be useful. For my own purposes, I think I would go nuts worrying about whether to make a link nofollow or not. So making it all dofollow is easiest for me.
Thanks for the great networking party you are throwing on Facebook. The opportunities to meet others online nowadays are incredible, but being a good host still takes old-fashioned politeness, understanding and interaction.
The default with this plugin is dofollow. However, it allows you to accept marginal comments or links but change them to nofollow. Very handy!
Leora,
I’m in the midst of learning about DoFollow and can’t really understand why it is Valuable if the default is NoFollow.
Besides, because most of my commentors are probably less experienced then I am — and I don’t know when a blog is Do or NoFollow — they probably won’t know either??
I would just leave it in your case. If you wanted technically-oriented webmaster types to comment on your blog, I would say, definitely, make it DoFollow! I’m not even sure myself how helpful this is… other than Larry, none of the commentators left more than one comment or any comments on any of my other posts. They were just trying to get mileage out of this one.
I believe that Google still follows nofollow links but just does not apply any page rank to them, in other words your site would not pass page rank on via the backlink so wouldn’t help your rankings.
Applying the nofollow tag to specific pages within your own site allows you to control the flow of page rank throughout your own site which can give a boost to your main pages.
Yes, that’s true – it doesn’t mean the links aren’t followed by the search engine, just that they don’t have the same “weight” of importance as the dofollow links.
Hey thanks for the link and great article; educating people that Nofollow should only be used on paid links or maybe to prevent spam is important.
I remember when I started out; someone on a forum told me to use Nofollow on every link to improve my SEO!
Thanks for the explanation Leora. And in reply to your experiment… it worked on me ;)
I’m sure you are aware but for your readers – you can no longer sculpt PageRank using nofollow – Google changed their view on that a number of months ago. So even if you have both nofollow and dofollow links on a page, the PageRank will be divided up between all the links, not just the dofollow ones. The only difference is that the nofollow links won’t pass the PageRank.
“The only difference is that the nofollow links won’t pass the PageRank.”
Would you have a link that explains this in more details? Thanks!
Yep works.
I think previous comment refers to; being able to put nofollow on 1 link on a page and the seo benefit would then transfer to the other links on the page. This is NOT the case now.
Keep up the good work.
Dan, thanks for the clarification.
I think blog platforms should give users a easy option to manage the follow characteristic of their blogs, and explain that on the process of setup.
So (I think what you are saying is) for example when you first set up WordPress, you could have an option to have it be nofollow or dofollow. Given that WordPress and other platforms want to keep their core as simple as possible, I think the ability to do dofollow by plugin is fine with me.