Avoid The NoFollow
Everyone knows (and if you don’t know, now you do) that commenting on other blogs related to your niche is a good way to get your name out there and drive a little human traffic to your site/blog.
Many new bloggers/webmasters assume that these “free links” to your blog will also help to increase your Google SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) and your Google PR (Page Rank). Well guess what? Many, if not most of these comment links will not squirt any PR-juice your way thanks to the NOFOLLOW tag - this is because by default, most blogs/forums automatically use the NoFollow tag. Recently though, many bloggers are getting on the DOFOLLOW bandwagon and removing the NoFollow tag passing the PR-Juice to all those that make comments on their blogs. This is a bit of a double-edged sword because although removing the no-Follow tag encourages visitors to post comments on your blog, it also invites spammers, so if you remove doFollow be sure that you’re using Akismet or some other method for filtering out the spammy comments.
OK - So… Whether or not you remove the doFollow tags from your blog, how do you know if the blogs you visit or comment on have the noFollow tags removed so you can benefit by posting comments? You can do it the hard-way by viewing the page-source and checking for the noFollow tag, or you can do it the easy way:
How To Display The noFollow Tag In Firefox: This is how i do it
If you use Firefox you can easily show all links with the noFollow tag in a different color, making them stand-out against links that do not have the noFollow tag by doing the following -
- Find the UserContent-example.css file in your
C:\Documents and Settings\Shared\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[randomprofile#].default\chromefolder. The application folder is hidden, so be sure to change your folder view to show hidden files and folders - Rename usercontent-example.css to usercontent.css
- Add the following line to the bottom of usercontent.css:
a[rel~="nofollow"] { border: thin dashed firebrick! important; background-color: rgb(255, 102, 204)! important; } - Restart Firefox
You can change the RGB colors to any valid RGB code to make the noFollow tags display in any color you choose. If you did it right, you should see a difference in the two links below:
This link does not have the noFollow tag: Wikipedia.com
This link does have the noFollow tag and should look different: Google.com
Happy-Blog commenting!
