There are two main reasons why I still post on “nofollow” blogs rather than just the “dofollow” ones, the main reason being that as a newcomer into the blogosphere I am starting to appreciate the moderation of comments, conversation, and other efforts that bloggers put into their blogs.  By contributing in an intelligent conversation on a related blog, you are going to naturally attract readers to your blog from a more targeted source than search engines.  This highly targeted traffic can be easily monetized with affiliate commissions and since they came from another blog, assuming you have good content, they are far more likely to subscribe to your RSS feed and be frequent visitors to your blog.  It also makes them far more likely to be bloggers themselves, and toss you a blogroll link or a post about your blog.

The other reason I comment on nofollow blogs is simply because good comments can be few and far between, and a frequent high quality commentator on a blog is likely to receive some kind of reward from the owner.  That is why I use Lucia’s Linky Love plugin, I try to moderate my comments so that only the high quality comments make it onto the page, but if you get 3 posts then suddenly all your links become dofollow.  As a nofollow blog owner as well, I have had repeat visitors to my blog leave excellent comments each time I post, and as a result I gave them free links in my blogroll.  Everything in the blogosphere moves at a different pace than on most marketing forums, with blogs there is a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” mentality rather than the competitive and self-promoting atmosphere of most forums such as DigitalPoint or Warrior forums.

If you could choose between having a comment on every single dofollow post on the internet, or every single nofollow post on the internet, which would you choose?  This is an important question to ask yourself, because this is how you should base your link building strategy.  For my own needs, I know that I would far prefer a link on every nofollow post as the sheer traffic that would result from all the WordPress.com, Blogspot, self-hosted blogs, etc. would outweigh by a 100:1 ratio that of dofollow blogs.  This traffic alone would be all I need, but it would also create a huge storm of coverage of my blog, and in the internet marketing world it is all about getting your name out there.

On that note, my name is James Spinosa and I am an internet marketer headed to a midterm.  Remember that this blog is in fact dofollow, so feel free to post your comments but leave the spam at home and feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed.

The problem behind this theory, is that the real hardcore automated spammers out there will still continue to do so, they are just now hoping either for traffic or to hit a few of the “dofollow” blogs. Think of it this way, if you were to have a comment on every single blog post on the internet, would you really care whether or not the search engines are looking at it? The traffic from this would be absolutely massive and it would have to make others take notice and link to your site anyway. The creator of WordPress himself says that the nofollow tag is not the solution to blog spam as it helped short term but then others continued anyway.

As a link builder, it is essential to seek out dofollow blogs and keep tabs on them so that you can wring out some of those all important do follow links (and blogs are viewed very highly in the eyes of a search engine). This explains the recent popularity of “dofollow blog search engines”

What is the solution? In my opinion a combination of software, social responsibility, and personal responsibility. If you haven’t noticed, this blog is “dofollow”, I have installed the Lucia’s Linky Love plugin which rewards those that continue to come back to my site and post. I feel that the way to reduce the amount of spam you deal with should be handled mostly by society and software that you use to weed through blatant spam attempts. This is done by showing your readers that unless you have reasonable comments, they will be deleted. If people look at the comments and they are all well thought out responses that took a minute or two to write, others will follow suit. As a reward for this, those that return and post several times will see that their links become regular links without the nofollow tag and those that truly take the time to contribute should be added to your blog roll.

In closing, making your blog do follow can be a blessing as it will increase traffic and the comments will pour in and as long as you tightly regulate the comments coming in, it will set the right example for future visitors/commentators. Feel free to comment below, and read my comment policy first