Top 9 Reasons DoFollow Can Hurt Your Blog

February 12, 2008 by
Filed under: Link Building 

Many bloggers have been joining what is dubbed the “dofollow” or the “u comment, I follow” movement. where they install a WordPress plugin that gets rid of the standard “nofollow” attribute attached to blog comments. This means that the search engines will follow all of the commentators links and share the blog post’s pagerank. At first, this may seem like a great idea and a way to get more comments on your blog as well as get more community involvement, but it also has some very damaging flaws. Here are my nine reasons why joining the dofollow movement can hurt your blog.

9.) Requires more of your time
You will have to spend more time editing anchor text links, deleting bad comments, finding out which comments are truthful and which ones are spam, which ones have sites that are now offline, which ones are unrelated links, and so on. In the shortest explanation possible, installing dofollow will mean you need to spend a lot more time moderating comments.

8.) There are better alternatives
I am a strong supporter of the top commentators wordpress plugin. This provides your most avid readers a way to receive a free bonus benefit for contributing to your posts. It filters out the majority of spam comments and “one time readers,” and also shows that they read your blog on a consistent basis. The top commentators plugin is also a lot easier to manage for bad linking, anchor texts, and 404 pages.

7.) Bad Neighborhood Linking
Part of the Google ranking algorithm judges on what types of sites link to you, and what types of sites you link to. If you are a blog that talks about hockey, and you start linking to gambling blogs, Google will add a penalty to your site. This would mean all of your normal blog post links would receive less authority and so it is a lose-lose situation for everyone.

6.) Fake Comments
By providing a reason to comment, a lot of your readers will post fake comments that provide zero extra benefit to the blog posts. For a recent case study of dofollow flooding a popular blog with useless comments, read this article.

5.) Zero Uptime Control
A huge problem I run into running my “top commentators” linking section on my sidebar is the uptime of external blogs. My sidebar is on every page of my blog, so by being a top commentator you get over 100 links. I previously had a top commentator who stopped blogging and shutdown his site. When Google visited and cached my 117 pages, it showed a 404 link on all of them. For a super recent example, click on the picture below:

bad-links.JPG

4.) Does NOT Improve Your Writing
Generally speaking, readers should be commenting on your blog if they like (or don’t like) what you posted. Comments are supposed to be a community feeling. If the only reason people are commenting is for links, then you will never improve your writing as you will believe 30 people truly thought your blog had an “awesome post,” when actually they were just spammers. Without the Dofollow plugin, the only people who comment will be people who actually read the post and they will be the ones contradicting you when you make a bad post, have a few typos, or have a disagreeing opinion. Those are the true comments that you want!

3.) Less Search Engine Traffic
In simple math terms, the more external links you have on each page the less authority your blog has. If you have 100 blog posts with 5 dofollow comments each, you have 500 links that are leeching your pagerank. By removing those 500 and only keeping the 50 that you write about truthfully in your blog posts you will rank higher and give a lot more benefit to the actual blog posts.

2.) More Keyword Spammers (Anchor Text Comments)
Normally the “name” section of the comments would be for where you put your name. This would allow readers to recognize who made the comment. With Dofollow enabled, you will see the vast majority stuff their keywords in the name field. For example, instead of seeing “Collin LaHay“, you would see “make money blogging” when I would leave a comment. I hand edit a lot of keyword stuffed comments, so you can imagine how much extra time dofollow would add to my moderating schedule.

1.) Increased Comment Spam
By providing extra benefit to comments, you will see a massive increase in blog comment spam. Your blog will be listed on “dofollow” search engines and you will receive hundreds of spammers across the globe who will pretend to write legit blog comments for the sole purpose of links. You will see a lot of comments that say “great post” or “very true,” and it will take a lot of extra moderating time to filter out the legit comments from the spammers. Commenting is about building a community around your blog, and if the only people that are visiting your blog are there to spam, what does that tell you?

I know a lot of you want the comments on this blog to be dofollow, but for the sake of a long term community I choose to support the top commentators plugin and not the dofollow movement.

What do you think about Dofollow?

Comments

38 Comments on Top 9 Reasons DoFollow Can Hurt Your Blog

  1. Robbert on Tue, 12th Feb 2008 3:57 pm

    2. On a blog I used to manage, I also had the Do-Follow plug-in installed. The only thing it did was – like you mentioned in this post – increase the number of comments with: “good post”, “nice article” or “keep it going”.

    These comments really make you think, why do I have this stupid plug-in installed.

    On the other side, I really like your blog, but the top-commentator is withholding me from commenting on every post. I really hate sitewide links :o

  2. Sudarshan on Tue, 12th Feb 2008 6:16 pm

    3. You are Absolutley right,I was in the situation before,I remember that once I activated the do-follow plugin and spams flooded…after that I realosed my mistakes and corrected it out

  3. Felippe Oliveira on Tue, 12th Feb 2008 8:24 pm

    4. I agree 110%, after reading some post on John Chow about turn on the Dofollow I was thinking about that, but later on I changed my mind, I’m not a full time blogger yet so wouldn’t have time to deal with spammers and their Anchor Text Comments…

  4. Rakesh on Tue, 12th Feb 2008 9:16 pm

    5. I agree with you colin. DoFollow brings more PR hungry people than quality readers.

  5. Affiliate Confession on Tue, 12th Feb 2008 10:00 pm

    6. It is interesting because most of the “do follow” blogs I come across, I don’t usually leave comments on. I think the top commentators plug-in solves the whole issue.

  6. Binh Nguyen on Wed, 13th Feb 2008 7:24 am

    7. I strongly agreed with Collin on this. Heheh no, that “strongly agree” is not for spamming because you don’t have dofollow anyway.

    I recommend anyone to use Dofollow is to set the high number of comments before the nofollow is lifted. Such as 10? And I also suggest that the plugin owner make option boxes to allow manual removal of nofollow on some loyal commentators only.

  7. Collin - De Ruyck on Wed, 13th Feb 2008 7:52 am

    8. I have not noticed any spamming a sof yet and to be honest it almost seems losing page rank can happen just as fast as getting cancer these days. Don’t do this your going to get cancer, dont do that your going to get cancer…..to be honest bro I am sick of this industry dictated by Google.

  8. Ruchir Chawdhry on Wed, 13th Feb 2008 8:36 am

    9. I think that Do Follow is a great way to give back to the community. Yes, it has it’s problems. But I still have my blog as do-follow. My blog gets much more comments than blogs thrice its size. The comments aren’t one word, my commentators do actually leave a valuable comment.

    And who says you have to invest time into checking whether the links are in good neighborhood or not etc? There are plugins that allow selective do-follow, only do-follow a commenter’s comments after he has commented ‘n’ number of times.

  9. Ziva - Remarkable Resources on Wed, 13th Feb 2008 2:04 pm

    10. Hi Collin,

    I really appreciate your detailed explanation about this. I’m kind of new to blogging myself and my head has been spinning somewhat over what plug-ins to add, whether to allow the do-follow, etc, etc… This post really clarified some things and I’ll be installing the top commentators plug-in for sure.

    Thanks!
    ~ Ziva

  10. kexbrown on Wed, 13th Feb 2008 4:36 pm

    11. After being smacked down by Google on paid links I am wary of any outgoing links. I have implemented do follow on my top 10 commentators. I think their community spirit is worth as much.

  11. Troy on Wed, 13th Feb 2008 5:08 pm

    12. I think it really depends on your blog and the niche you’re targeting. If you’re trying to get a community of repeat visitors going, some people may see it as insulting to put up dofollow links. For small blogs especially, spam shouldn’t be a problem and can be easily counteracted.

    As a blog grows, it becomes necessary to implement the nofollow tag whether you like it or not.

  12. Futon-Matt on Thu, 14th Feb 2008 10:07 am

    13. I have a hard time with this issue as well. I want people to be able to comment on my blog, but not at the expense of bad links.

    Matt

  13. Louis Liem on Thu, 14th Feb 2008 9:26 pm

    14. I don’t think using Top Commentators will stop people from spam commenting. They’ll still try to stuff comments to get their name listed.
    I agree with Ruchir about limiting the do-follow only to authors having a certain number of comments.

  14. Ziva - Remarkable Resources on Thu, 14th Feb 2008 10:04 pm

    15. That’s also a good point, Louis, but in looking at the FAQs for this plugin it seems like there’s some controls that can help set it up so there’s some benefit to the few who are actually “engaged” in the blog but makes it not so attractive for the hit-and-run spammers.

    I suppose there will always be a battle to find ways to maintain interactivity and still keep the spammers at bay.

    Here’s the FAQ for Top Commentators…
    http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....idget/faq/

    Still need to get this installed on my sites…

    ~ Ziva

  15. James Mann on Fri, 15th Feb 2008 7:16 am

    16. I must admit that I have been having second thoughts about activating the DoFollow plugin for my WordPress blogs. Perhaps Top commenter is the way to go.

    I guess my make money online blog isn’t popular enough to those comment spammers as I didn’t see the number increase when I started using DoFollow.

    Question: How do you deal with 404 errors like that. I still have a lot from when I changed from static web pages to a blog.

    I know I have too many external links on my blog but it’s good to get a reminder. I will go through and see what I can remove.

  16. Collin LaHay on Fri, 15th Feb 2008 1:18 pm

    17. Use a “301 redirect” (you can google that) to redirect them to active pages. It will still take Google a week or two to move everything over.

  17. Link Love Weekend Post | Guest Blogging, Guest And Ghostwriter Services - PiggyBankPie on Fri, 15th Feb 2008 5:04 pm

    18. [...] Top 9 Reasons DoFollow Can Hurt Your Blog – Friend Collin tells you why you should seriously consider to remove DoFollow if you are using it. [...]

  18. Louis Liem on Sat, 16th Feb 2008 8:14 am

    19. I’ve downloaded it and tried it for some minutes. I guess I’ll stick with the nofollow for the moment :)

  19. Binh Nguyen on Sat, 16th Feb 2008 8:54 am

    20. can we have just names without the summary of the comments similar to the LastHalo?

  20. Collin LaHay on Sat, 16th Feb 2008 12:05 pm

    21. So it shows “Comment by Binh” [Webpage]

    Webpage would link to your site? This would avoid anchor text spamming but will still penalize you for bad neighborhood penalties.

  21. Aswani on Sun, 17th Feb 2008 8:23 am

    22. your tips are really effective. I am linking back to your blog from my blog. My blog url is : http://cyberholic2007.blogspot.com

  22. Matt Ellsworth on Mon, 18th Feb 2008 12:42 pm

    23. we use dofollow on our blogs and while we do get more spam a few anti spam plugins and it has dropped by 90%. Not to mentino that I just hit spam for any comment that doesn’t use a name…

  23. Breakaway on Mon, 18th Feb 2008 12:55 pm

    24. I think this is a fantastic post not only for bloggers, but also for link builders. I am going through your link building cookbook, and now that I know the 9 negative affects it has on people’s blogs, it’s going to make me think twice before i go through and spam someone’s comments section, just to get one extra link.

    Thanks for the eye opening.

  24. Graham Smith on Tue, 19th Feb 2008 2:17 am

    25. This topic is certainly hotting up. I have seen similar articles over the last few weeks and they pretty much all echo what you are saying which is good.

    It’s always good to see that similar authors come to the same conclusions about facts like NoFollow. If everyone came up with different answers for the sake of being different then it would all become a bit messy.

    I actually came over from CK marketing after reading your comment on his take on it. I do this quite a lot, read other peoples comments then click on the name link to check out their website if they had left a interesting comment.

    Although I hadn’t associated your name to your site which I had come across just a few days ago anyway!! :)

    I still use the DoFollow, along with Top Commentators and Comment Luv, but simply because its a new blog, so I am not being hit with to much junk or spam. So for the moment I am happy to live with it. But the points you have raised above have been memorised for future application. :)

    Graham Smith
    ImJustCreative
    Blog & Web Ramblings from ‘my’ Gutter.

  25. Mike Huang on Wed, 20th Feb 2008 4:53 pm

    26. Great post Collin, thanks for your tips :)

    -Mike

  26. paulette on Sun, 24th Feb 2008 8:56 pm

    27. I beg to disagree with your opinion. Do follow makes your reader feel that they are important to you although time consuming on your part.

  27. Is dofollow a bad idea? | ChillyCool Web Digger on Fri, 29th Feb 2008 3:10 pm

    28. [...] Top 9 Reasons DoFollow Can Hurt Your Blog At first, this may seem like a great idea and a way to get more comments on your blog as well as get more community involvement, but it also has some very damaging flaws. Here are my nine reasons why joining the dofollow movement can hurt your blog. [...]

  28. Max Miroff on Sat, 1st Mar 2008 10:47 am

    29. DoFollow has a bunch of positive points as well, but I’m debating putting it on my blog. It’s a hard choice to make – more management/risk vs. a possibility of more comments.

  29. Geeko on Mon, 10th Mar 2008 3:48 pm

    30. Well, I can’t see any good reason not to ditch the nofollow thing. Just use an antispam like Askimet and don’t publish comments that have nothing to do with your articles. Many, many bloggers don’t have a clue anyway. They’ll post a comment when and where they feel like posting one. A stupid, long blogroll will harm you more than just comments, especially if it is displayed on every page.
    Nuff said.

  30. Mike Gates on Sun, 22nd Jun 2008 8:54 am

    31. I normally wouldn’t comment on a nofollow blog like this. I always prefer commenting on dofollow blogs because I appreciate getting some credit for adding content to blogs. I get that on dofollow blogs :-)

    You make some good points, but I will still go dofollow.

    My blogs are dofollow and it takes me just a few minutes each day to moderate and remove questionable comments (thanks to Spam Karma2). I only leave comments that are related to the post and when I can tell they actually read the post.

    I can also tell what sort of information is resonating with my readers by the number of quality comments I am getting on posts.

    I suppose when your blog gets to be really big, it would be impossible to go dofollow. But, I think it is good for smaller blogs that are trying to build a sense of community.

    Mike

  31. Douglas Karr on Wed, 9th Jul 2008 9:07 pm

    32. I’m not sure I agree with a single point you made here. I’ve removed nofollow from the source of my blog and it’s provided great results.

    I always have spent time reading comments on my blog and keeping out comments that didn’t make sense or didn’t add to the conversation. As a result, spam hasn’t made it into my blog, nor has my blog been hurt with the search engines.

    Instead, I’m now getting much improved conversation by folks who may not have commented on my blog in the past since there’s an incentive to do so.

    The bottom line is that user-generated content has helped my blog skyrocket in the search engines (don’t measure today, I just did a 301 from another domain name so Google is still shuffling links), not the opposite.

    With much respect,
    Doug

  32. Penny Gould on Fri, 8th Aug 2008 1:29 am

    33. I have been following this debate with much interest. I first read about this on Dawaud Miracle’s site, and it encouraged me to host my first blog outside of wordpress.com so that I could remove the no-follow. (I’m trying to get up the nerve to hack the code and do it!) I keep a list of blogs with no-follow removed at the bottom of my listcharity.com and onlinegamerkid.com sites. If one wanted they could work their way through the “D” list. I was horrified today when I saw over a dozen comments to adult sites on my children’s summer camps blog! http://www.hi-from-cybercamps.com/ I had to scramble to figure out how to force moderation of comments, whew! Shudder to think who might have seen those incredibly offensive comments! Spam is a HUGE problem, but I’v had very good luck with the built in spam blocker Akismet until today :-)

    I wish I understood what is meant by “link leak”. I basically don’t bother with page rank at all, I get keyword searches hits and it doesn’t seem to matter what the pagerank of the site is for keyword hits…. So my policy is to give links to new sites that need to be found by the robots, and leave comments on posts that are interesting… I encourage people to do what interests them, and success will follow naturally…

  33. Bea Huntersly on Wed, 28th Jan 2009 12:36 am

    34. Oh crud, one more thing to worry about… I have a whole bunch of websites, and being scatter brained, they’re all about different things… And since I own them, I link em all up… Will that hurt, since I’m linking to and from sites that have absolutely nothing in common? I just have blogrolls that say “friends on the net” or “interesting places on the net” and random stuff like that… Worry? Not worry? Your recommendation? Thanks!

  34. Kevin on Wed, 4th Mar 2009 4:47 pm

    35. Cool, I think I’m gonna turn on link lurve to my website :D

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