This post started as a follow-on comment to my post “Not All Dofollows are created Equal,” but it started to get long and linky, so it became a new post. In the previous dofollow post, I was wondering why, given the number of comments I write on other blogs, I get so few inbound links from comments, and so few inbound links on my WP dashboard in general. There are a lot of blogs that claim, as mine does, to be dofollow blogs, and/or to offer comment luv. I am much more likely to comment on a blog that has dofollow and/or commentluv. So why so few incoming from comments? And the reverse side of the coin: Does my “dofollow” blog generate the kind of link luv that I intend it to for people who comment on it? Let’s test.
The Test
I have a mostly abandoned blog called wazzup local blog, that I use to test things on. So, as a test, I posted a comment to “Do follow Part I” and gave it the link to the wazzup blog. I invited my readers to do the same and report back, and as you see, a few of them did. First let’s see what we get on this blog. Indeed, as tested when the “dofollow” plugin was installed a long time ago, it does indeed generate the real link shown below.
<a target="_blank" href="http://blog.wazzuplocal.com">Wazzup</a>
I waited over a day then logged into the wazzup blog. Over on the wazzup blog’s dashboard under Incoming, it says:
This dashboard widget queries Google Blog Search so that when another blog links to your site it will show up here. It has found no incoming links… yet. It’s okay — there is no rush.
Well FOO that, I can query blogsearch.google.com manually. Maybe that will actually help things along. So I went over there and typed in
link:blog.wazzuplocal.com
and got Goose Eggs. Blah. I know my first dofollow post on Hot Dorkage should have been blog indexed when I published days ago. So why doesn’t google blog search find it? Hmmmm….. well guess what, even
link:dorkage.net
does not turn up the post, so of course it’s not going to find the links in the post if it doesn’t even have the post.
Just what the heck is blog search anyway and why have a special search for it? Some more digging in Blog Search vs Web Search: How are they Different? brought up these two nuggets:
Blog Search Engine bots will index your website as soon as you ping them (or notify them about new content on your blog). Search engines spiders are much more lazy (unless you are a PR8 or PR9 website) In fact, it’s not even guaranteed that a search engine would index your site.
That sounds good, because most modern blogging software includes automatic ping to all the major blog search engines in their publish protocol. But could it be that blogsearch.google.com is not on the notify list for my ping plugin, or the plugin broke after WP 2.7? We can test that too. OK I manually pinged blogsearch here, as it says in Google’s help. Now we wait. While we’re waiting, here’s the downside to blog search engines:
Web Search engines index all parts of your webpage including reader comments, text in the sidebars, etc. On the other hand, most blog search engines index just the text of the blog post that was supplied to them inside the RSS feed. They won’t index other elements of the webpage like Archive links, Blogroll, etc.
Comments would not normally be included in the RSS feed, and even if they were, they don’t usually exist when the blog post is first pinged! And what’s more, if you publish only a summary feed, blogsearches may not find any of your links at all.
Test Results: Resubmitting a link to blogsearch and waiting 24 hours produced no discernable results.
And further digging in Pro Blogger (definitely worth a read!) reveals that Google counts your feed subscribers as a major determinant of the quality or worthiness of your blog. Me, I’d much rather have web visitors, because I can track them directly for one thing, and for another, they’d see all the kaching kaching bling bling that I haven’t bothered to put in because I don’t have enough traffic.
Then I thought, “Who cares what my WP dashboard says. Foo Google’s blogsearch; probably more people use regular search anyway.” So surely by now, the crawlers have by gotten around to some of my timeless pillar posts. Alas, search results for links my domains brought little joy: only one page of results, and one of the links I verified did not seem to contain a link at all. But according to Google’s Webmaster tools I have 2000+ inbound. I actually verified a few of them. I guess those are not “listed,” so they count for nothing.
Up against a wall
Summary
I’m afraid us isolated rural small fry with our small but ooooooh so wonderful communities are up against a pretty formidable sized wall. If you’re big, you’re enabled to give link luv to commenters because the blog search engines and the crawlers will fulfill their role in the scenario. If you you are small, you effectively can’t help your friends in that way even if you try. It’s like the Bible says (paraphrased in Lolcatese), “2 them wha’ haz, mo’ are be given. 2 them wha’ hazn’t, meh.” Chuck Westbrook, (runs an orphanage of sorts for underappreciated blogs) we need you!
I just activated my dofollow and commentluv plugin and have joined the cause in blogger’s united 🙂 Some interesting points you have here about being on Google Blog Search, I manually pinged mine too a few weeks back and I am still awaiting on results, bah.
JustinSMVs last blog post..Why You Should Drop Twitter Tool Qwitter Like A Bad Habit
>Me, I’d much rather have web visitors, because I can track them directly for one thing,
You may want to look into Feedburner for your RSS feed, it lets you track your subscribers, what they click on, etc. (I blogged abt it here: http://bit.ly/yU3Z )
Andrea Hills last blog post..Six Services to Enhance Conversation and Community through Comments
Feedburner is fine but it doesn’t track web visitors with the same anal precision as my web server analysis tools.
Even Feedburner say that the number of subscribers to the blog is an estimate.
Do you check your backlinks in Yahoo’s Site Explorer too? I have found it is more current than google webmaster tools, but doesn’t show as much as google does.
In my experience, the “links:” command is pretty limited though, more so than site explorer.
One of the other cool things about Site Explorer is that they have an API that is easy to work with. I have a simple app I made to check backlinks, which organizes the info (IMHO)better…
I’m rather newbie to blogging and still improving my knowledge about all the techie stuff around the blogosphere. Thanks for sharing this article.
We’re going to turn on link love in our blog if for no other reason than all the publicity said blogs are getting. It seems like I can’t turn around without stumbling across an article talking about this group. Why not capitalize on that press?
Nice post. I agree with you on the link love and comment love stuff wholeheartedly. Keep it up baby!
I always allowed follow, isn’t that what we are all doingn here? No really other then nasty spam comments, (which I delete anyway) link love is the way to go!
ASKME: Thank you for your comment, but are you sure you are doing follow? I had a look at your website, and it doesn’t appear to have comments at all, or be set up in the form of a blog. What blog platform do you use for your clients? A lot of blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger) add rel=nofollow to comments by default unless you do something. Remember: nofollow/dofollow has only to do with robots. If your comment is not spam and it gets displayed, a human can always follow your link.
For wordpress the Dofollow plugin reverses the default nofollow behavior. CommentLuv adds yet another outgoing, not only to the commenter’s blog, but to their latest comment.
I hope to be able to put both of these things back in my blog ASAP. I think getting off the entrecard umbilical cord will help. I’m seeing more reads since I disabled dofollow and CL, so I hope soon to get to bootstrap to that magic tipping point where I have enough LUV to share. It would be really nice to enable DF and CL only on “popular” posts where you decide what constitutes “popular.” Hmmmm… I feel a hack coming on!
i have noticed that magazine style wp themes are much better in crawling then using other normal themes …
wat do u say ?
i think diff niche magazine style themes should also be available.
LinkLuv and Top Commenter are great plugins that can really help drive new and return commenters to your site.
The best thing about dofollows is that there are hundreds of dofollow search engines and dofollow lists online and not even half of them are dofollow. Can’t anyone make a proper list?
Hello, i guess this is as good of a place as any to post and let you know. I went to subscribe to your RSS feed, and when i clicked it i got an error that said “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING” followed by other gibberish that scrolled off the screen. I had to force the page to stop loading because it locked up my browser. Cheers.
Thanks a lot for this info. 🙂
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