Follow/NoFollow questions

Hi Guys,

I have been reading Lynns post on"Link Marketing: Pingbacks vs Blog Comments" and she mentions Follow and NoFollow links.

I understand that it's best to place your backlinks on sites that have Follow links as this passes page rank and can help your own sites ranking.

1) I was just wondering if we set up a blog in Wordpress, is it automatically a DoFollow link site?

2) Lynn said she uses a plugin called "• DoFollow WordPress Plugin " Should we use it to make our sites DoFollow sites or is it better to make a NoFollow site?

3) I have installed a plugin which highlights & color codes follow/nofollow links on a website, and I was wondering how do we know by using this plugin if it's worth leaving a link considering some sites have a combination of Follow/NoFollow links.......where should I be looking to see if this site is primarily DoFollow?

4)I have also been adding the rel="nofollow" tag to all my affilate links, so they don't bleed page rank....shoud I be doing this or not?

Thanks.

Leave comments at both nofollow and follow sites. Google is the only search engine that uses the nofollow tag. They still follow the link but don't use it for PR calculations. Having only Follow links would probably look odd to Google. If they are a relevant site, I leave a comment. You get some traffic from them (I call it breadcrumb traffic building). You get links in the other search engines and Google does see it just discounts it.

Wordpress links in a post are follow. Comments are nofollow. You use plug ins to make them follow. Some plug ins reward people for posting a certain number of comments and making their links follow.

3) Look in the place you are leaving your links to see if they are follow. Unless they use a plug in as mentioned above, they will be consistent.

4) Yep. Add the nofollow to your affiliate links. No point in sending PR juice to them.

Thanks for your feedack...

just wondering how you leave comments on a blog.....i really want to use my anchor text as the name, for the keyword I'm ranking for, but that looks spammy...so how do you go about it, while at the same time making it beneficial for your keyword ranking?

Also should i make my blog Follow by adding a plug in? I guess it doesn't matter if I have my comments closed...is this right?

Should I have my comments open and make them dofollow???

I will take a shot at it.

To understand Follow/NoFollow you need to understand Pagerank (PR). Page rank was a device that Google created to allow them to measure a sites authority on the internet. It is a scale from Grey to 10. Grey means you have been parked in the Google supplemental files. Zero is where everyone starts. As you build links into your site, your PR increases. Hi PR means high authority and recognition on the net. (This is a very basic summary of PR). You can see what your site's PR is by using a toolbar add on in Firefox. There are sites that will also display your Page rank.

One other note on PR before we go on, the PR we see in the toolbars is published by Google every few months. They change their internal rankings on a much faster basis so while it is useful it is not the final say in life or how your site ranks.

So lets assume your site has a PR of 4. Each link out of your site carries with it some Link Juice. It helps to boost the site it is linking to. For example if the NY Times links to my website, it carries more weight than if Joe's Local Drug Dealing site links to mine. Links in build up your PR and authority while links out carry PR with them.

But say you want to link to a site and not let it carry any Link Juice with it. Google developed the nofollow tag to allow the site owner to control PR within their own site. It's use has evolved over the years for affiliate links and other items as well. Wikipedia makes all external links nofollow.

The Nofollow tag means that no link juice follows the external or internal link. It does not mean that the search engine does not see where the link goes. Google's spider checks out where the link goes but their algorithm does not use that link to determine it's authority status.

Supposedly Google has developed a separate measure on authority that it has not released publicly.

Every link is follow unless it is tagged with nofollow. Google is the only search engine that really uses it since they invented it. Nofollow links back to your site are still good because they create a trail to your site. People follow trails too :) The nofollow links simply don't provide as much value in the eyes of Google as a normal link does.

Hmm not sure that was simple at all but hope it helps.

Scott

I believe it was originally created to combat spam comments on blogs. It gave the webmasters the ability to show that comments were not authorized by the owner of the site.

As with everything, it has morphed into something different and will probably change more before it is over with.