The No Nofollow Highs

Last week the No Nofollow | I Follow | Dofollow community on Bumpzee crossed the 100 member mark, and 100 blog mark. This week we are already up to 137 members and 132 blogs. What is more encouraging is that I see a lot of members actually using Bumpzee for browsing blogs.

Some interesting points:-

• 2nd Highest Number of blogs – the blogs were individually submitted to the community
• 4th Highest Number of Members – we could well overtake Jim’s How to be successful community in a couple of weeks.
• Many of the communities already overtaken have been established much longer

There are hundreds, even thousands of blogs I could add to the community, but I would really prefer people make the decision themselves.
Every blog included is vetted. I pick up lots of blogs that don’t have nofollow removed correctly, blogs made from affiliate datafeeds, blogs that are mainly resyndicated content, and even blogs with totally broken comment systems.

There are no requirement to use the Bumpzee widget to be listed, or the voting button, although blogs that do include the voting button do gain more traffic if their readers are Bumpzee aware.

If a blog doesn’t have a visibly active community, leaving comments on a regular basis, I am going to go snooping around and your chances of being included are reduced.

The community didn’t benefit from being the first on Bumpzee, such as the Affiliate Marketing community, and the first managed blogs such as the SEO/SEM, How To Be Successful, and Next Gen Marketing, the later communities I might add also had a few non-member blogs added.

The Lows – Dofollow Abuse

I suppose if you model yourself as the internet equivalent of Ghengis Kahn then the idea of charging people to have nofollow removed from their comments would be attractive, but I have noticed that many of John Chow’s readership (the grown up ones with money) don’t appreciate it.

If I was an advertiser buying reviews on Johns Blog, I would worry about how the quality of readership is deteriorating as his readership supposedly increases, though I am sure his readership will appreciate the male enhancement text ads.

Some of my readers have already been writing about this

Chris thinks this is a bit of a perversion of the Dofollow movement and goes on to say:-

Personally, there isn’t a blog on the planet that I would pay to have a followable comment link on, nor would I ever charge for one. Followable comment links are a nice thing to give away, but I just don’t feel there is any benefit at all to buying one. Well, apart from to Johns bank balance of course.

Webstractions gives lots of reasons why you shouldn’t pay for the links, and why you shouldn’t use the plugin John is selling on your own blog.

RT has actually already written twice about it, first of all in one of his drivebys where he said:-

After reading the news about it at Blog-Op and then reading the source article myself at John Chow dot Com, I’ve decided that John’s money-grabbing link whoring has turned me off for the last time. So much so that I’m removing his links from anything I have, including my feed reader. See ya later, John!

He later went into even more depth about John Chow:-

I may not have the best blog in the world (far from it) but I refuse to have it even remotely associated with bloggers that use or abuse their readers in any way, shape or form. Sure, their blogs are their blogs and they have the right to use them anyway they want. I’m sure it won’t bother them to lose just little old me as a reader, but if more people know and more people follow suit, I’m sure it’ll bother them a whole lot more.

The Paper Bull had equally strong words about John Chow

He can call it whatever he wants – but selling a $10 monthly membership to turn off the no-follow tag on comments is about as distasteful a scheme as I’ve seen in a while. Blogs are built upon conversation and are wholly dependent upon comments left by readers who valued the article enough to spend a few moments to tap out a response. Using comments as a means to extract coin is disgusting.

Reputation Management Lesson

Alienating your most valuable readers to gain more 13-year-old kids isn’t good practice.

Tip of the Nofollow / Dofollow Iceburg

Over the last 2 months the number of references to Dofollow shown in Google has increased by 50,000, and over the last 6 months it has more than doubled.
Whilst that is significant, I would love these isolated blogs to become part of the no nofollow community on Bumpzee where they can share their link love, and interact with blogs talking about similar subjects.

Only you can make it happen

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

Armen has One Stupidly Simple SEO Tip to give you.

Actually I have been discussing these techniques for months giving myself all kinds of deep links from comments to highly related content. I linked to one good article from Armen’s post in the comments, and there are some free ebooks available that tell you lots and lots about linking, affiliate marketing etc.

Deep links are very important for domains with lots of content. If you can get one or 2 links to every article you write on your blog, that is going to help build up a very strong profile for the Google algorithms, and by linking through to good related content, you are much more likely to get people linking though to you, because you give them a reason to do it.

You need to leave more than "I’ve been writing about this too, here is my link"

Seriously links like that look automated, and I bet a few of the links that have been dropped on various meme sites are automated.

You are provided with a link box and that is what you should use for your links. You are not going to have perfect anchor text, but at least the links are highly relevant.

This will possibly get a little messed up by Top Commenter plugins, and definitely will cause some buts with Avatars for MyBlogLog, but you will be providing much more useful content.

Interview With Vlad on Affiliate Marketing (includes Dofollow)

Fraser does some great podcast interviews about Affiliate Marketing and this time he interviewed Vlad. In some ways this is fun for me, because Vlad interviewed me by email recently, though not a podcast.

Vlad gives some good beginners tips for affiliate marketing and goes into detail about why he is such a strong supporter of DoFollow (and he mentions me a lot which is a good way to get links).

As I have already mentioned today, it is hard to see links to a top level domain when Technorati suggests you have had 60+ with the amount of memes going around that I didn’t actually join.

Link to some related content and it makes your link more useful, and if you link to someone’s post who has DoFollow, you are able to control the anchor text for the trackback.

Some backlinks can be quite powerful even with careful control of Google juice, and can give your link more relevance. I have some nice internal PR5 pages to link to such as my list of nofollow & dofollow plugins

Missing Out on Bumpzee Link Juice

Every part of bumpzee, unless a blog owner chooses otherwise, is followable links.

How much Link Juice are you missing out on by not joining?

The Bumpzee main community page is PR6 already and that filters down into the top communities, and through lots of smart linking.
Join some communities. Every community has a message board and if you are among the top contributors, you get a link that is most likely PR5.

With the No Nofollow community on Bumpzee already in the top 5 communities (and soon to take the 4th spot), it is guaranteed to get a good share of the link love.

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

Comments

Tag: dofollow

If you want to share the love from your blog, I compiled an extensive list of "dofollow" and "nofollow" resources covering major platforms such as WordPress (on your own domain), blogger and Drupal. It is also possible on Typepad, and Dawud Miracle and Karen have been discussing ways to present the complicated procedure to remove nofollow on Typepad. Hopefully I will be able to link to a solution soon.

In my review of Blogcatalog recently, I mentioned that one of the key things I would like to see is for the Nofollow link to be removed from the site profiles.

This is how the site profiles used to look when viewed using the Search Status Firefox Plugin which highlights nofollow links on the pages you visit with a pink box.

That link wasn’t just nofollowed. It was also passing through a redirect script to count the number of clicks the link had received, important for their rating system and to help advertisers to evaluate the value of the listings they purchase. Some redirect scripts can pass on link juice, but a clean link is much better.

Blogcatalog Sharing the Link Love (No Nofollow)

The page now looks like this:-

As can be clearly seen, the link no longer has the nofollow extension, and thus passes on juice.

What about the redirect?

<h2>Andy Beard – Niche Marketing</h2>
   <h3><a href="http://andybeard.eu" onclick="return o(‘andy-beard-niche-marketing’);">http://andybeard.eu</a></h3>

You will see here that this is a clean link which uses the onclick parameter to count the number of outbound clicks from the page. From what I can tell from limited testing, pages also load a lot faster with the new linking method.

Not All Links Are The Same

Some would argue that MyBlogLog has provided followable links from the start, and they are certainly to be congratulated for this. They also have a number of useful linking structures that help bring their profiles into prominence.

It is interesting studying the value of links from various services just by doing a quick vanity search on Google for Andy Beard.

The MyblogLog linking structure with the number of links using that term internally really makes them highly relevant.

That doesn’t however help much on relevance for other terms not associated with the name of the blog, or blog owner.

Here is another vanity search, but this time on "Andy Beard – Niche Marketing"

Ok so that link text is being used through to my page profile on Blogcatalog, so it is not really very fair and also is very prominent on Bumpzee for the same reason.

Lets use a term that I use in my description on multiple syndication sites to see which is giving me currently the best relevant link.

"Blog Search Engine Performance"

Blogcatalog is an older domain, but that page with description is much younger than my profule on MyBlogLog.

There are references on Bumpzee for that phrase before MyBlogLog appears.

This isn’t conclusive research, but as of this writing the page that is ranking for Blogcatalog is often based on my old rating within the service – as my registration was quite late, it was fairly well buried on each of the listing pages, often 4 or 5 pages deep.

It takes Google a number of days to recalculate ranking based on links. Thus it is only going to improve.

Blogcatalog Introduces Real Tagging

Please first of all understand that this seems to be the first stage of implementation, but it demonstrates clearly the direction Blogcatalog can take and the speed they are implementing changes.
The removal of nofollow was quite a simple matter, but implementing tagging certainly took a little more work, in just a few short days, on a holiday weekend!

Lets take a little look at Meg’s Blogcatalog profile

Now my geeky readers will no doubt notice that not every site is currently working, and that the tags currently being picked up are Megs categories defined within a feed such as:-

    <category><![CDATA[blogcatalog]]></category>
  <category><![CDATA[mybloglog]]></category>
  <category><![CDATA[Australian Blogs]]></category>
  <category><![CDATA[blogsearch]]></category>
   <category><![CDATA[blogging]]></category>

hat was taken from Meg’s feed (she has actually got 2, one at WP.com, and one on Feedburner – they really should support redirects)

Blogger blogs do things slightly differently. Here is an example of the code in Johns feed at Finding The Money.

<category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="networking" /><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="promotion" />

Those are generated by using labels on the new blogger, thus it would be worthwhile using lots of them, or creating additional links to a tag space that shares link love back with you.

I don’t think it will take long to have this picking up all forms of tagging such as rel="tag" anywhere within a feed item.

That is what they would have to cope with on my blog, where a post might only be in 3 defined categories, but be tagged with 10 or 20 tags.

Blogcatalog Tagspace?

The microformat "rel-tag" definition dictates that the end of the URL you use to link through to the pages that form a "tagspace" should end with the word in question.

The destination of a rel="tag" hyperlink is required to be a tag space (a place that collates or defines tags), where the last segment of the path of the URL is the tag

Blogcatalog now has links such as

http://www.blogcatalog.com/post-tag/blogsearch

As a demonstration they have built a global tag cloud, though this doesn’t yet have a comprehensive data set.

They also have the links to tags as previously highlighted, and the ability to search tags.

Tag Search

This is becoming a little confusing, and I am sure things will become refined over time allowing even more powerful features.

Currently we have a number of search options:-

• In the Blog Directory – this searches the blog directory descriptions only – as an example a search for "SEO" currently doesn’t find my blog listing, even though it is highly rated in the SEO category, and I use SEO for a blog defined tag – SEO is even a term found in one of my reader reviews, but that isn’t picked up. Tag and Category are probably terms that shouldn’t be picked up, but review content probably should.
• In Tags – these allows a search in predefined tags when blog accounts are created. As an example a search for "BlogCatalog" doesn’t come up with any results, because no blog has currently defined that term as one of their core topics. A search for Wordperss in the tags comes up with my blog at the top, because my blog is currently the highest rated blog using that defined tag.
• In Blog Posts – this searches the content of archived blog posts. It should be noted that there is a lot of stored content with some listings going back over 1 year on a search for the term "Wordpress" – I wonder if data such as categories or tags is also stored (the raw RSS data) – if they have all of it, that is a lot of content that can now be recategorised with tags and who linked to who within the content.

Popularity is currently based upon blog rating, I am not sure how relevance is counted, but it would also be possible to introduce other metrics such as linkage and add additional authority based searches or options.

• In Blog Post Tags – this is the new form of search previously discussed, that will allow bloggers to define what their post is about using the rel-tag microformat already used by Technorati, and their blogging platforms existing category system.

BlogCatalog vs Technorati

As I have already likened Blogcatalog to MyBlogLog, it is now time to take on an even bigger player, Technorati.

Technorati could roll out a networking feature, but their current size means it isn’t something that can be rolled out fast without also introducing a massive support and spam problem. Technorati autodiscovers sites and feeds, often polluting its index, and is a primary target for junk.

Blogcatalog could easily encroach on Technorati’s space, whilst remaining devoid of spam, and already having a social feature built in.

Blogcatalog is only indexing feeds which it is told about and isn’t scraping the blog itself looking for additional blogroll links which aren’t necessarily a good indication of quality, because it can be easily gamed. Authority with Technorati can easily be established by releasing a few themes or widgets, or having a blog as part of a network, as I have discussed in the past.

Blogcatalog is probably lacking in historical data, but that isn’t honestly hard to get. They could always write a simple "Pick Me Up" plugin that can be installed and provides an RSS feed of all previous posts, and I am sure something similar could be possible for all platforms, maybe something like a dynamic, blog content only sitemap.

Fancy charts and tables are fairly easy to add

Technorati Is Ugly in Pink

Blogs added to Technorati are not added manually – Technorati find them by itself, and only at a later date are they removed from the index if they are found to be "splogs".
Lots of the feeds Technorati is encouraged to collect aren’t unique blog feeds.

With all the poor quality content being added to the index, there is no wonder Technorati choose to add nofollow on every page, but that is also their undoing.
Many smart bloggers, because Technorati isn’t sharing any link love don’t link to Technorati directly, and use internal tagging. WordPress will have tagging built in with the release of WordPress 2.2.
Wordpress.com has for a long time used its own internal tagging system, and I questioned a while ago that this was potentially an extremely smart SEO move.

Technorati is heavily cross linked, but all the cross linking is nofollow ugly pink links.

Blogcatalog can justify having followable links, because there is a human review process for every blog, and they have also added a voting processs and other quality controls to highlight the highest quality content that readers find valuable.

Conclusion

I have had direct contact at various times with people from MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Bumpzee, and at this time I have no direct financial incentive to promote one particular service over another, and am purely writing about what I observe to be great features, and encouraging more.
I don’t know whether I am the only person directly encouraging Blogcatalog to add what I feel are cool features, and some of these features are also a feature of Bumpzee, who I have also actively encouraged to include them both publicly and in normal user feedback discussions by email.

So far I am only scratching the surface of what is possible…

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

* DoFollow – many look on this as the granddaddy of NoFollow plugins – you just switch it on and it works, all nofollows are removed from comments and trackbacks.

* Dofollow (WP Plugin) – Sometimes I wish this one has been given a better more descriptive name. It includes the ability (optional) to remove nofollow from comments after a period of time.

* Link Love – this is a brand new plugin that removes nofollow after a certain number of comments have been made – this rewards regular commenters – one thing I like is that the detection is based upon email address and not domain or URL, so it allows a commenter to spread the links how they like.

* GoodLinks – This plugin looks extremely useful for many people who have layout problems when people post long URLs – it also removes NoFollow as an option

* Blank Target Comments – Another multi-purpose comment link plugin – it removes nofollow from only the comment author links, and adds target="_blank" – no link because it doesn’t seem to be available for download any more which is a shame.

* Remove Nofollow – Cristian Mezi from SeoPedia’s plugin – I am not sure of the history or features, but it is probably similar to the original DoFollow plugin.

* NoNofollow – Including this link for historical reasons – Bronski’s plugin doesn’t work with newer versions of WordPress, but credit where credit is due.

* WP-Nofollow – Again included for historical reasons – one of the first plugins for WP 1.2 based on the original MT plugin code

For those that like hacking core files Rob has a simple guide to removing nofollow, though I prefer to avoid hacking any core files as it makes keeping WordPress up to date easier.

Other Platforms

MoveableType users can find information on how to remove nofollow as well.

Some Plugins Not Included?

I did find a few other Nofollow plugins available, but they appear on sites that are using nofollow for links in their own comments, seemed to be copies of the same code others provided, or were just dead links so I didn’t include them here.

Add Nofollow

If you want to do the opposite, and add NoFollow to certain types of links, here are some resources. There are some great and totally legitimate reasons you might want to do this.

* Add Link Attribute – this plugin is extremely powerful in the hands of someone who wants to control the flow of Google Juice around their site. Some links are purely navigational, or link to forms or other pages both on or offsite that do not contain content. This plugin allows you to zap them without modifying core files.

* Wikipedia NoFollow – want to reclaim the Google Juice you send to Wikipedia that currently stops flowing, and turns Wikipedia into a black hole – this plugin is the perfect answer – if Wikipedia turn the flow back on, you can reciprocate just by switching the plugin off.

* WP Temp Nofollow – I am not sure how up to date this one is, but if you have hacked WordPress to remove the nofollow code, you could use something like this plugin to add nofollow back for a period of time. It was designed for older WordPress versions that didn’t have nofollow as standard.

* NoFollow from Home – This one is interesting from an SEO perspective in that it adds nofollow to links in your content on the home page

Add NoFollow Other Platforms

* NoFollow List (Drupal) – Allows you to add a list of sites to nofollow (such as Wikipedia)

Lots of people in the last few day have proclaimed (finally) an end to using Nofollow on their blog and many of them are friends or regular readers. Now whilst I would like to link to them all, there are far too many of them (plus I have something else planned). Instead I am going to link to the one that I feel is most significant. Dougal Campbell has just installed a DoFollow plugin, and as a core developer of WordPress, this is a major development. Maybe we can see some optional features within WordPress and WordPress.com soon.

I would love to add more to this list, so if you know of other plugins, especially for platforms other than WordPress, please let me know in the comments and I will add them to the list.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

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About the Author

Andy Beard – Niche Marketing – Blog search engine perfomance, WordPress and general niche and affiliate marketing tips