Ok, I am taking a big leap of faith on this blog in that today I began allowing DoFollow links on comments and trackbacks. Why is this a leap of faith? Well, I already get TONS of spam bots sending over their junk comments by obvious amateurs who are clearly just buying the next easy commenting software. For the most part, Akismet picks these up well and I don’t have to deal with them. Obviously it is not my intention to increase this.
Rather, when reading a blog post today by a trusted blog and SEO software company, I came across a little note on their comment form about KeywordLuv. And, being the curious person I am, I clicked to find out what it was.
Well, turns out this little plugin allows users to leave a comment AND get the anchor text link juice in the specific keyword set they want to link for by adding @Their Keyword to the end of their name (WordPress by default hyperlinks the name with whatever URL is entered in the URL field). Hmmm, sounds interesting!
Allowing DoFollow Links (Gulp)?
Allowing DoFollow Links, Step One, Get a Clean Slate
 The Test for Allowing DoFollow, What will happen?
So, here is the test. Will this, and you can chime in with your experience in the comments below, minimum 400 characters of course ):
- Increase my comment traffic with real people looking to genuinely add value to the site and post?
- Increase my spam comments to the point where I will quickly turn it off off and go back to normal business as usual?
- Or, some combination of the two?
Nah, much ado over nothing Bill. Trying to scam google is futile. And if we learned anything from their latest update, it’s that google doesn’t have a sense of humor.
Most serious businesses are trying to get people to their sites, under the presumption that they have done a sufficient job with their site to keep a new visitor’s attention, perhaps long enough for a conversion, but at least long enough to gain a fan. And a returning visit bears far more google-fruit than a artificially disseminated backlinks. When all is said and done, it’s all about organics.
ok, did I make it to 400 🙂
Hi Bill, really interesting post. I’ll be honest, I was searching for a way to ascertain in advance if a blog is allowing ‘dofollow’ links. We’ve just developed a new website and I am keen to build up our inbound links. Can you check this in the source code before posting? Anyway, we do have our own blog, so I would be interested in hearing how this pans out for you. It might be a way for us to get more engagement going. All you see at the bottom of our articles at present is the occasional tumbleweed. I hadn’t heard of KeywordLuv before and I’ll definitely check it out. Thanks a million. Al
There is an easy way of doing this using the search engines (i.e. checking do follow). Search for Ryan Deiss’s Authority Codes and it will show you how exactly.
Thanks Bill. Thanks for the reply. I took the plunge and made our blog ‘dofollow’ and installed KeywordLuv. So far so good. We are getting lots of spam comments but Akismet flags them as such so they are easy to deal with. Thanks again for the great post. Al
Bill, I will be curious to know if this actually works or just gets you a boat load more comment spam.
Well, I will update the blog post Johnny once I have some results, still a bit early to determine.