Many people aren’t actually aware of this, but many of the backlinks you’re creating to your website by replying to relevant blog posts, are completely pointless in terms of SEO, thanks to the use of Nofollow tags.

(When I say this, I am assuming that you create good, valuable content in blog comments – rather than just blog spam comments – but the very fact you’re reading this says you’re probably not the blog spamming type, if blog spammers spent time reading about what they’re doing, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing – as most of it is completely pointless)

Nofollow tags simply tell search engine spiders not to follow links on a page – and they were introduced in order to help stop the motivation for spammers to plague blogs & forums with pointless, valueless spam comments just in order to get backlinks.

Personally I think it was a bit of a strange movement that most of the web marketing community have followed. The real value of spending time & effort creating valuable content by replying to blog posts, and other forms of content, has been taken away just to deter spammers! There is a far better way, in my opinion….

If there is a link on your website that you don’t want there – you don’t want it there because it has no value to your reader, so you’ll want it deleting, not making nofollow. If you just make it nofollow & don’t spend the time to make sure that your visitors time isn’t wasted by following spam links, but you do spend the time making sure that these links aren’t followed by the search engines, what you’re saying is that you’re making your website for the search engines, not for your visitors!

So – what is the point of nofollow?

Well, there are plenty of reasons to nofollow your own less important pages, for example terms, privacy & so on – to keep as much of the available link juice flowing to your important pages.

But – most blogs use the NoFollow tags in the URL of comments.

In my opinion there’s no need for this. Here’s what I do, and what i’d recommend others to do also:

1: Use a decent anti spam comment filter then all the spammy comments will be binned anyway.

2: When you have a new comment, check the quality of the Comment -is it an auto post which makes no sense in terms of the post content, or is it a generic post such as “Great post” – etc? If it’s obviously auto generic comments and offers no value to your readers, bin it.

3: Have a quick check of the URL. Is the website in some way relevent to your niche, and are you happy with the quality of the site & it’s content / features? If yes, and the comment is OK – then leave it. If the site is not on target for your niche, or if it’s a pile of crap site just full of adsense ads, bin it. If the comment isactually OK – but the website is a pile of rubbish or not relevent, then ditch the link but keep the post.

So why is everyone still using nofollow?

Well, firstly not everyone is using nofollow, there is now a strong movement away from using nofollow for all comments, there are growing numbers of people who share this same opinion as I do.

Having said that, the vast majority of blogs use nofollow and many large websites, including wikipedia.

Most of this is due to the fact that most blogs are set to nofollow as standard, and most people don’t realise there is a need to change this.

The easiest way to see if links are set to nofollow, is to use the seobook SEO for Firefox addon, which is a simple plug in for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Just download the plug in, go to options, and select for nofollow links to be highlighted – you’ll then be opened to a whole new world of nofollow links – and you may notice some interesting things.

Firstly, check if your own blog is set to nofollow the comments – if it is, then I encourage you to join the movement, bring the value back to blogs by saying no to nofollow. You can do this by downloading add ons for your blog package.  If you use wordpress, as I do, there are a number of nofollow remover plugins you can use.

Personally I use two plugins – one called Nofollow case-by-case which allows you to be selective in your use of Nofollow, rather than setting is as default, and another plugin called Nofollow Reciprocity , a very clever plugin which allows you to automatically nofollow links to those larger websites who are known to be using the nofollow attribute in order to help them to sculpt their pagerank.

You see, although most people use the nofollow attribute now because it’s set as standard in blog packages, there are a number of people who’re using it in order to try to hold on to as much as the link juice flowing to their site as possible.

The idea many people have is that the link popularity coming in to any page of your site, known as “link juice” is let out through links, so by getting as many links as possible into your site, and letting out as few as possible – your juice will rise, and your google page rank will increase.

The truth is that it doesn’t quite work like that, you don’t “lose” link juice by linking externally, it’s simply that the amount of link juice that goes to the page you’re linking to is devided by the number of links on the page. Yes, if you only have three links from a page then each of these links are going to do a lot better off from the link than they would if you linked to 100 pages from the same page – but it wouldn’t do your site any harm either way.

The link juice you share with other sites isn’t lost.

Using nofollow to hoard pagerank on the most important pages of your site & stopping it flowing to other sub pages, does make sense  – but using blanket NoFollow on outbound links, is pointless.

Many people are not aware of nofollow links, and give content in forms of blog content, forum posts, and other forms of content, thinking that they’re gaining something in return – give & take. If you’re using the nofollow attribute to get without giving, while allowing contributors to believe that they were actually getting something in return, you’ll find that people stop participating.

As more & more people are becoming aware of nofollow, many people are checking this before giving content, in the form of blog replies, forum posts, whatever it may be – so you will probably find as time goes on, less & less people will be visiting your blog who do actually have the ability to add good content. Think about it, if someone can spend their time contributing somewhere that does give something back by allowing a backlink which does count – or they can spend their time contributing to somewhere that will not allow backlinks which count, where are you going to contribute?

Thanks for reading, and if you found this post to be of value – link to it, and don’t make it nofollow! icon wink No Nofollow Here! Join the Anti Nofollow Movement!

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