Internet Marketing Strategy Blog By Roy Sencio

In keeping with the movement of spreading some link love, this blog is now a “dofollow” blog, with a recently installed Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin.

A couple of days ago I made a post which talked about an Easy Blog Marketing strategy, which is to leave comments on other sites. This is a one way linking mechanism, which was however abused some years ago, until in 2005, the default became “nofollow”, and i will tell you what it means later.

Now leaving a link on someone’s else’s blog creates an opportunity for targeted traffic to your blog, especially if the blog you are making a comment on, is similar in theme or content to yours. As a traffic source, this is referred to as a site referral; when a surfer on another web page, finds your link, clicks it and is directed to your site. This is also a good source of traffic but volume of traffic is affected by factors like, placement of your link or its location on the page; traffic volume for that specific page, etc.

A more significant traffic source are the search engines, who send traffic to your site if you are ranked well for certain keyword searches; these keywords are related to the content on your site and Google gives you a ranking based on their criteria. This is longterm in nature.

This was how commenting was abused by spammers a couple of years ago; the dropping links almost anywhere and in huge volumes, especially on blogs where in most cases the link went live the moment the submit button for the comment was hit. In order to counter spam-dexing, the nofollow attribute was adopted and so most sites and blogs automatically and be default use the no follow attribute.

What it means is, when a spider crawls a page, it is instructed not to give any weight or influence on a link destination, and thus if that link was pointing to a page on your site, that page does not earn the SEO benefits that any typical link would have given it.

By turning of the nofollow instruction, and setting the blog to dofollow, comments become valuable placements for these links, and can give both instant site referral traffic and long term search engine driven visitors.

Now, simply turning off the no follow might not be enough, as this can still be abused, which is why of all the plug-ins available, I chose Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin. Why?

Here are the features:

1. Encourages good comments: Dofollows are added to the author “name” and links in comment text after a commenter leaves some minimum number of comments. The blogger can set this minimum number to anything between 3 and 10. This encourages regular visitors to comment, but discourages spammers by forcing them to visit your blog many times before they get “dofollows”.
2. Encourages links. Dofollows are added to trackbacks and pingbacks only after the blog author has left some minimum number of comments, trackbacks or pingbacks. This discourages scrapper sites from sending you spammy trackbacks but rewards real bloggers for linking you.
3. Gives peace of mind. Dofollows will not be added to comments left more than 14 days after you published your most recent post. This is a safety feature that prevents your blog from becoming a link farm should you ever be unexpectedly absent from your blog due to illness or any other major life event.
4. Thwarts overly aggressive SEO types. The blogger may refuse “dofollows” to “names” that contain too many characters. This can be used to avoid giving “dofollows” to commenters who claim their name is “cashmere dog sweater”.
5. Gives you more control over dofollow / nofollow options. As is always the case, the blogger can also delete the comment, report the comment to Akismet or delete the name or url. That’s good for truly spammy comments. But with Lucia’s Linky Love, you get another, less drastic, option. You manually prevent “dofollow” but still show the comment url and name by deleting the user email address when editing the comment. This lets you permit borderline visitors continue to comment, but deprive them of “dofollows” until they behave the way you like visitors to behave.

If you would like to get this plug-in and give some link love, you can check out here money.bigbucksblogger.com/lucias-linky-love-a-dofollow-plugin-to-foil-human-comment-spammers/

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