Dofollow Blog Comment Are Of No Use!
Dofollow became a phenomenon in the early ages of search engine optimization. When blogs needed authority links for their websites (to have a higher rank in google search), the blog owners came up with the novel idea of awarding a free link to commenters in lieu of a quality comment. These types of comments are commonly termed as a “Dofollow Comment” and blogs which offer dofollow comments are known as “Dofollow blogs”. At first, this concept had its benefits: Bloggers got decent amount of extra traffic and the no of comments per article showed an upward trend. It seemed a win-win for all!
But, as is the case with many ideas: users started misusing this concept. Spammers got hold of a list of dofollow blogs. They started abusing by adding spammy links usually intended for self promotion in their comments. Their comments didn’t add any value to the discussion. Also, instead of investing their time on reading the blog article, they automated the system of commenting, which made things even worse.
Now, due to excessive spamming and automation of commenting, the number of comments rose from a few multiples of 10 to hundreds. And, almost like 99% of these comments were spammy. Bloggers came up with the solution of anti-spam plugins which blocked such spam comments. This solved much of the spam problem. From then on, some bloggers choose to have dofollow blogs and some don’t.
In my opinion, dofollow blogs are of no use for the blogger as well as the commentator. I know, most of my friends as well as my readers may not agree with what I’m about to say. But, my opinion is based on my 5 years of experience in the blogging field.
For Commentators
Dofollow comments have little SEO value
Most of the online users believe that dofollow comments have a good SEO value i.e it affects their page rank as well as their search engine rankings. But. I beg to differ!
Google Makes sure its value is nullified
Google has made it a point to tackle link spamming i.e. to curb the misuse of seo for promoting below average web pages. Firstly, if a page which has a lot of outbound links which are not relevant with the context of the website. Then, the page ranking of that page goes down. And so, the the link juice also goes down (google punishes such pages because they are linking to a malicious or a non relevant site).
Also, if a blog gets many comments, then your comment will not have any value because search engines like google only crawl a fixed number of links and if there are many comments, your comment may not be crawled. Hence, no link juice!
Bloggers eventually change their blog status
Bloggers eventually realize that they are not getting indexed on many searches because of the dofollow nature of their blog. So, they decide to change their dofollow blog to a nofollow blog to get a higher page rank. I have seen many major dofollow blogs getting converted into nofollow just because they wanted a higher page rank.
This conversion meant that all the comments that you made earlier in that blog are an utter waste of time and and all link juice will be lost!
Nofollow passes some link Juice
This is not a fully proven theory but people believe that nofollow still passes some link juice. If that is true, it doesn’t matter whether you use nofollow or dofollow.
For Bloggers
Excessive Spamming
You are inviting trouble if you are announcing your blog as a dofollow enabled blog. Spammers get attracted to such blogs because they think that such blogs pass some real link juice.
Guest Blogging will have little value
A guest blogger submits a guest post, because he expects good quality traffic and some inbound links (for his blog). When a blog becomes dofollow, all links have equal status. therefore, a link in the guest article is similar to the link in the comment. Thus, it is easier and faster to submit a comment than writing a full blown article.
Encouraging Commenters and Rewarding Them
Commentluv is a good alternative for rewarding commenters. It improves the visibility of commenter and also, increases chances of improving their traffic stats.
In Totality, dofollow doesn’t have any meaning in this era. Commenters can be engaged and rewarded without spamming search engines.
Let’s Discuss
What do your prefer Nofollow or dofollow?
