Friday, May 11, 2007

Lets Support "DoFollow"

Most of you will know by now, that links left in the comment sections of a blog do not register as an SEO benefical link (search engines ignore them); that is unless you’ve implemented ‘DoFollow’ on your blog. Implementing DoFollow is a practice which has recently been made popular by Andy Beard (who lists different ways to remove NoFollow), Randa Clay (who designed a custom logo for the ‘I Follow’ gang), and helped by a WordPress plugin.
I for one, am in complete support of removing the NoFollow from blog comments, and I’ve removed it from this blog. It’s great all around. It encourages more comments, a stronger community, and increases the links to your blog.

However, here is one simple tip that I really think will boost your Page Rank and SEO, giving you more ‘authority’ in the search engines.

For most of us, leaving a comment on a another blog is quickened by the fact that your ‘details’ are automatically filled in. Your name, email address, and website address; all you have to do is write the comment, and hit enter.

Now here’s the thing; if the blog you’re commenting on has removed NoFollow, and your comment link now possesses ‘Google Juice’, is it wise to always point to your homepage? According to some SEO experts, we should be deep-linking at every opportunity. With Google continually working on producing more relative results, they know that an article on any given keyword, will generally give the searcher what they’re looking for a lot better than a homepage. For that reason, their algorithms are designed to pull up articles with links pointing directly to the article.

Therefore, wouldn’t it be an idea to replace the link to the homepage in the comments section, to one of your best articles? Of course, you’d change the article you’d point to every few weeks of commenting or so, to spread the weight.

Google aren’t stupid, they know that if a site has lots of deep-links to various pages, it must be a credible, and respected site. In turn, Google reward such a site by ranking it higher in the SERP’s, and granting a higher Page Rank.

Of course, if you really wanted to (in the words of John Chow) be evil, instead of putting in your name as the anchor text, you could change it to the article title, or a keyword. However, I strongly recommend you don’t do that as it’ll probably annoy the blog owner and their readers. In fact, if someone did that on my blog, I’d probably delete the comment altogether.


Source: iffect.net
Author: Armen

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