Not all dofollows are created equal

nofolloway31I comment on plenty of of blogs. I never noticed my comments scoring me serious incoming links on my WP dashboard, even from so-called “dofollow” blogs. That’s what dofollows are meant to do — increase your incoming link count, and ultimately bump your Google PR.

I thought incoming links in the dashboard were either like “the curious cat,” who actually links into Hot Dorkage in the body of their post, or Experience Freak, who blogrolled Hot Dorkage.

I thought maybe WordPress had some filter that identified comment links and just didn’t mention them; either that or a lot of blogs were misrepresenting themselves as dofollows.

Imagine my surprise when I saw two new incoming links emanating from comments I had made.   It does comments?  COOL!  But then….. Only two?

I don’t know about you, but it is easier for me to comment than it is to sit around and wait for people to link to me. Given that, why is it that so few of my comments on other people’s blogs generate this type of link juice? Are there really that few blogs with dofollow?

I want to give my readers  every incentive to comment on my blog.  I assumed that I was.   Then a thought hit me:   If a reader comments on Hot Dorkage does it really register that type of link juice on their WP dashboard?   I don’t see why it wouldn’t. When crawlers hit the individual blog posts, all comments are expanded. We do not put nofollow tags in comments so it should register them.  But does it?  Only testing will tell.

I’m going to test comment as my other blog and let you know what happened, but 100% external readers would probably be a better test.

WP users, especially 2.7 users:   please leave a comment here and let me know if it registers the type of linkilicousness that I assumed I was offering to commenters. I don’t know how often those dashboard in-links update, so give it a day before you check.

I already pass on commenting on blogs that make me log in.  In light of this new information,  I intend to restrict my commenting in future to blogs who offer only bona fide link juice.   And if your blog isn’t doin’ it, FIX IT!

Thanks for reading.

25 comments to Not all dofollows are created equal

  • Hmmm what brain fodder on a cold morning. Now we let the army of crawlers do their thing and see if the wazzuplocal blog scores an inbound tomorrow.

    Wazzups last blog post..Personalized License Plate

  • I’m not enjoying WordPress 2.7 so far – built our new company website using it, but some of my favourite plugins haven’t been working as I’d hoped. Anyway – testing for you 🙂 Hope it works!

    Matts last blog post..Does Your Website Deliver Results?

  • Hmm. Interesting. I wonder if my blog does this? Testing…

  • Coincidently I happened to think the same as you. Incoming links use to appear, then desappear, then reappear in my dashboard from one month to another, i don’t know why yet.

  • admin

    Month to month? Dude, they appear and disappear on mine from day to day. Probably at the whim of blogsearch. I did some further research and I’ll have some answers in a subsequent post.

  • I’m not using 2.7 yet, but I’ve noticed that I usually only see links in my dashboard when someone links to one of my sites in a post or in their blogroll/ sidebar. I also see mybloglog comments for some reason??? Rarely do I see a link when I leave a comment – just as you are noticing.

    WordPress is getting it’s link data from Google Blog search so maybe the Google Blog search feed API doesn’t value comments as much as it does in post and sidebar links? Perhaps that’s why we’re getting these type of results.

    Personally I preferred it much better when our WP dashboard showed new links via Technorati. There’s a way to change the source of links in the Dashboard but I haven’t tried it. In 2.6.2 you can edit the incoming links area and change the url (say to a Technorati feed) but I’m not sure what the correct search feed url would be to use for Technorati. Perhaps WordPress.org would have that listed somewhere.

    Anyway, I wouldn’t blame the sites that you are commenting on … it’s the Google blog search feed that’s not picking up comment links properly.

    Tricias last blog post..You’ve got to see this – Shanghai Lady Drives Off With Tow Truck

  • Tricia, Your guess is absolutely spot on. (This is really Colleen the dork but I’m not logged at the moment.) I dug around on this some more, and you’ll see in my follow on post, that’s pretty much what I’m finding. Google blogsearch seems very capricious. The only blame with the sites I’m commenting on is that they tend not to have huge PR’s and so Google blogsearch is perfunctory with them or misses them — totally not their fault.

  • […] Not all dofollows are created equal […]

  • I am testing on my blog as well,I hope it all works.

  • I’ve been curious about the WP dashboard links as well – I’d love to see some documentation if it’s intended to be a definitive list of who’s linking to you, just a selection, or what?

    Andrea Hills last blog post..Razorfish’s Patent on Measuring Social Media

  • i also curious about incoming links and outbond links..
    because i heard our outbond links not suppose to be more than our incoming links. i know that if we write comments will give us incoming link. but in the other side,if someone give us comment to our blog will it be incoming or out?
    and if we write a hyperlink to other website in our article will it give us incoming or out?
    and if someone put a link to our web will it be an incoming or out?
    thanks

    chichis last blog post..Mortgage Rates That Suits You Best

  • admin

    Yeah, it sort of goes like twitter followers. If nobody follows you but you follow a whole bunch of folks, you’re thought to be a worthless spammer. If nobody links in to you but you link out to a lot of folks Google tends to classify you as a worthless link farm. It’s called “Giving your link juice away.” If you make nofollow links, then your inbound to outbound ratio improves but of course those nofollow links don’t benefit the sites you link to. Comment luv not only links to the commenter, but it actually links to their most recent post, giving away even MORE juice.

    It’s beginning to seem to me like commentluv and dofollow may not be such a good idea on an underappreciated blog like Hot Dorkage. My nice dofollow outbound links are not going to benefit the linkee anyway if google blogsearch thinks my inbound to outbound ratio is too low and ignores me. So maybe I better hunker down and first garner some link power for myself before I can effectively share with others.

    Chichi, your questions:

    You comment on other blogs gives you an in link from them, but it might not be a dofollow, in which case it won’t count as a link-in.

    If someone comments on your blog, you link out to them but again it might not be a dofollow, so it won’t count.

    If someone links to your web it will be a countable outlink for them, and a countable inlink for you, providing it is a dofollow.

  • Why is these people making like difficult for bloggers? They want to penalize spammers? Blog owners know very well who is spammer their own blogs and who Google, Blogspot, WordPress to decide whether our blogs are being spammed or not? Like this post for example. If the blog owner thinks this post is a spam… please delete it, at least you as the blog owner has total control and power to decide who spams your blogs or not. This stupid “no follow” has effected so many “good” bloggers.

  • admin

    Sim Only… it’s not to *protect* us the bloggers from spam, it’s for Google & them to make a mechanical decision for the rest of the world whether our blog is spammy or not. If we just link to a bunch of random blogs hoping they’ll do the same to us and generate a bunch of spammy links then we are a link farm and nobody likes those because they are worthless. So Google calculates this outbound:inbound ratio. If you’re big and important and everybody on earth links in to your blog, you can link out all you want and do comment luv etc and all the blogsearches will pick it up because your outbound:inbound ratio is below the threshhold (whatever it is.) If you’re small with few in links, a few dofollow outbounds will kick your ratio over to the spam threshhold and then the blogsearches appear not to pay any attention to you. That’s the whole purpose of the nofollow — the crawlers don’t count those as outbounds and they don’t benefit the linkee for the search engines. I am going to have to take the long view and disable both dofollow and commentluv, so that I can amass some link power for myself first. It’s not doing any good for ANYONE for me to “share” if the blog search engines have decided I’m a spammer. Sorry, guys, if you want to turn that around make lots of GOOD inlinks to Hot Dorkage; and then I can return the LUV. A real easy thing you can do is find your favorite Hot Dorkage post and tweet it. For now it doesn’t seem like there’s any LUV for me to spread around, and all I’m doing by trying is draining the link juice out.

  • […] Not all dofollows are created equal […]

  • I’ve always been unclear about dofollow and nofollow–something I tend to rectify this new year.

    I am curious about your statement to only comment when you receive ‘bona fide link juice’. I comment anywhere I have something to say. I’ve never worried about whether I was getting link love in return. I’m still confused…am I being penalized in some way for commenting on blogs that don’t offer ‘link juice’?

  • admin

    Betty, thanks for your comment despite the fact that we haven’t got any link juice here. No there’s no penalty to you for commenting on any blog ever. In the follow on, we discover that even if one tries to be nice and offer link juice, if you don’t have enough, Google decides to give you less and then you don’t even get on the radar and then everybody loses.

    My statement was rash. I could edit it but I’ll leave it. When I said it I was hyper focused on getting better link juice for myself so I’ll have some to give out to folks who engage with the blog.

  • I’ve heard there is a plug in that automatically tell you what links are no follow anyone heard of that and have a url?

  • admin

    You don’t need a plugin, just look at the source of the page. If it has a rel=’nofollow’ it is not a dofollow. Links are do follow by default if they don’t have that

  • There is a plug in you can download but as far as I know, its only available for Firefox and I don’t fancy installing a new browser just to check dofollows and nofollows.

  • I think there is a plugin you can get but as far as I know its only available for Firefox. I would be using it but I don’t fancy installing a new browser just to see dofollow and nofollow.

  • admin

    it is a plugin for wordpress and it works on the server not the client. Anyone can see nofollow links if they just look at the source of their page,
    no plugin required.

  • If you download the SEOquake toolbar (its available for Firefox and Google Chrome) you can have it highlight do and no follow links for you to save you looking at the source code 🙂

  • Advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease.

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