Newbie Report is now No-Follow Free
The words “no follow” probably don’t mean much to the average newbie, but they can be critical to search engine optimizing your website.
You see whenever you place a link on your site to another site, you are giving away a little bit of “pagerank“ to that other site. You are endorsing that site and thus telling Google that they should give it a little respect.
Now the more you do this, the more it hurts your own site, because Google may begin to think that you’re selling links, or just a link farm. And Google may penalize you in their rankings. So it’s important to use nofollow tags on as many outbound and inbound links as possible.
When it comes to blog comments, the majority of blogs have “no follow” tags in their comments section, because they don’t want to dilute their pagerank with dozens or potentially 100’s of outbound links.
It’s actually easy to add no-follow tags to your links by adding “rel=nofollow” to your link structure example instead of <a href= at the beginning of your link, change it to <a rel=”nofollow” href=
If you’ve got a lot of outbound links on your site now, you should add the rel=”nofollow” to them. Affiliate links, Ads, Blogrolls, etc..
And if you have non-essential pages like contact, privacy, terms, login etc.. you should make those inbound links no-follow too.
OKAY – THIS IS IMPORTANT
I’ve just added a cool plugin to Newbie Report, because I want more users to comment on Newbie Report posts.
The plugin is called No Follow Free and it allows me to REWARD REGISTERED USERS after they leave a specific number of comments, which in my case is 3. They are rewarded by removing the no follow tags on their comment links.
So if you’d like to pick up valuable backlinks that will give you a little more Google juice, all you have to do is register as a user and submit THREE quality comments. After that. All your comments will have the nofollow tag removed.
Make sense? REGISTER NOW!
Oh.. and please don’t think that a comment like.. “nice post, I agree” is going to count towards your three..
Thanks for the post. I actually hadn’t seen the no-follow free plugin. I was considering putting up the dofollow plugin which turns off the default no follow tag since I don’t necessarily agree with never allowing a follow. However, this plugin is much better as it’ll help kill off the spam and give real commenter the follow benefit!
Oh, nice post, I agree.
Hey Dan…….Appreciate the opportunity for links…….
When I first read the “No Follow Free” strip on the upper left corner, I did not think to click on it……and my brain just registered the “No Follow” words and I immediately bummed out.
Consider putting copy at the bottom of each blog post that says something like “3 Comments and You Get Links Forever!!” or We Will Strip Just 4 U…(our No-Follow Tag that is)….
Ok….maybe I went a little overboard, but you would be reinforcing the ability to get links at the end of every blog post……….
Take this, a grain of salt and a shot of Tequila………..>>Rod
That’s a good idea.. or I might just change the ribbon..
K
Interesting plugin that has indeed motivated me to leave comments. One thing though, I do not see how I actually will get “links” from posting, as the registration only asked for a “screen name” but not for a related website url.
Just login and edit your profile
Thanks for replying so quickly. I’ve updated my profile with my url , but, I still do not see back-links on the posts I’ve left. Does the plugin do that automatically?
Ahhh, I see. I need to leave comments when I am “not” logged in. Another valuable lesson learned. Thanks!
Hi Dan: I’m trying to understand how the nofollow plugin works, I looked at the source code for this page. Doesn’t the following code ( class=”avatar”><img alt=” ) mean that my urls are still “no follow,” for my 7 comments?
LGBT Cancer (7 comments) 05.28.09 at 7:51 pm
Your avatar is no follow, your LGBT Cancer link is no follow free… the script only works with the hyperlinked username, which is a good thing.. just look at the 2nd link in the source.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. Another question. Assuming that text linked to a url matters for SEO (eg. linking the phrase “prostate cancer” to a website about prostate cancer), is it helpful or not to leave blog comments with names that act as relevant text links, such as I am doing by using the name “LGBT Cancer” (rather than my birth name, Darryl), for for a no follow free link to lgbtcancer.com Is that a good strategy to use for blog comments on all blogs?
It’s a catch 22.. if you leave a keyword relevant text link the site owner might not approve your comments because he’ll think you’re just trying to get a keyword backlink or he might not want those particular keywords on his blog. I think your safe with LGBT Cancer. But needless to say you can leave the best comment in the world, but if you’re trying to link with the keywords: P%#$@ Enlargement you probably won’t get approved.
Personally, I recommend playing it safe and just getting the link using a standard username.
HI,
I guess I am as “noobie” as you can be. I ‘m not getting how the no-follow thing works. What good is a link that doesn’t go somewhere? CLearly I do not understand the principles here.
Thanks in advance.
When you leave a comment or setup a profile, you can enter your website address. After 3 comments, it won’t have no follow tags on it.. which means you’ll get some seo juice on it. While all blog comment links are beneficial because visitors can click on them and drive traffic to your site… most blogs have no-follow tags so that search engines won’t follow them… Removing no-follow tags helps with the seo of the posted link, and can improve search engine rankings for your site.
I use “Follow Tags” at most of my blogs, because I like “Link Love” to help promote others, as it comes around.
Best,
-K