There seems to be a bit of an underground movement amongst many bloggers to utilize the DoFollow plugin these days.

I am perfectly aware of the history and why comments were degraded to a nofollow doldrum, but the nofollow policy setup by the cabal of search engines didn’t really help.

Spam scanning tools like Akismet and Haloscan seem to do a better job of screening junk out of comments.

Therefore, running a Do Follow plugin becomes an excellent way to reward readers for commenting. By the logic of your article above, it would also be a great way to increase the bidirectional flow of links to your blog from the comments. Plus, it encourages everone to not be quite so article selfish and get around to other blogs and just talk.

What do I mean by that last comment?

Sometimes people start to respond to an article, and before you know it they have 300-400 words of a response. The response itself is a passionate, sometimes factually strong refutation even, that can be a stand alone article. Under a nofollow system, the person that leaves that comment is basically slapping a great piece of content in the trash. It doesn’t do much for the person that writes it and only provides marginal benefit to the blog that receives it. Bloggers know this and so they often take that 300-400 words of a comment and drop it in their own blog as actual content. The response becomes a linkbait response to the original article. Maybe they link it and in odd why should I scratch the back of someone I passionately disagree with scenarios, they don’t provide a link.

With do follow enabled on blogs, people can and do get a backlink reward from leaving a comment. Kind of like going to a restaraunt, tipping the waiter / blogger, and then the waiter gives you a mint or something with your receipt. The backlink is the mint. Even in the scenarios where the comment is posted as an article elsewhere, there is now more motivation to link to the source article. If the source article does follow and if they have trackback links running, then your link to them will generate a comment with your link in it and you both benefit from the links!

It almost makes Blogging something like an ecosystem. Dare I say it becomes something like a self contained system, in a great big ball of bloggers working together. If I were to attempt to coin a catch phrase, I’d call it a Blogosphere. I think a blogosphere would be much more powerful than millions of little BlogoSilos, but that’s just my opinion. Feel free to refute me, I’m in the middle of adding Do Follow to my blogs, soon you’ll be able to benefit from refuting me on your own blog

Just curious, is Performancing or Drupal capable of using something akin to a Do Follow policy?

But if you’re high volume, at least relatively speaking, in your niche, then it could help.

Even with a new site you might be able to rank quite high for a version/combination of your keywords. One example-Don’t try to wine the race for -red wine-. Maybe try -california red wine- than move onto -oregon red wine-. In the short term you might get some results from the less searched term and in the long term you’ll notice some improvements since those two phrases both contain your long term goal.

set up a ‘how to improve perf’ thread and i’m sure you’ll get plenty of suggestions. For a reboot, well, i’ll add you to the list

BTW, I wasn’t involved in the decision to go with Drupal, though I think it was the wise move, given the large vision for Performancing.

By the way: post Dugg for ya I don’t have Netscape and Reddit accounts.

Honestly, we should do a blog reboot with Module suggestions.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Ranking_in_the_Search_Engines_Why_It_Takes_So_Long

http://tech.netscape.com/story/2007/05/18/ranking-in-the-search-engines-why-it-takes-so-long/

http://reddit.com/info/1rpec/comments

general idea – yes, PageRank is a useful measure of blog value and search ranking potential, but it’s not all there is to it.

Talking about this makes me angry, because half of me wants to defend SEO against the naysayers who criticise it simply because it doesn’t match their world views and their negative perception of this field makes it hard for an seo consultant to even talk to them without hearing crap.

The other half just makes me laugh, because yea, there are different ways to getting to the top of the SE rankings. Blogging and linkbaiting works just as well as SEO, because they are eventually two sides of the same coin.

You can be a linkbaiting linkwhore, or you can be a link request linkwhore – bottom line, you’re still lifting up your skirt to get paid, and you shouldn’t forget that, whether you’re a blogging evangelist or a hardcore SEO.

cheers

ad networks and pay per review services value PR because it’s an easy metric to measure relative link popularity, that does not make PR valuable in rankings in itself.

There are other reasons why it is valuable – being used by TLA or ReviewMe isn’t one of them.

Going back to the rest of the article.