The Unhealthy Obsession With DoFollow Blog Links

If you don’t know what ‘dofollow’ means, read this first before continuing.

Many webmasters or bloggers are infatuated with dofollow blogs. Not everyone is obsessed with them, but there are many who spend time or money trying to leave keyword comments on dofollow blogs, in order to improve their website’s search engine rankings.

They sell tools to find these dofollow blogs, they build apps to auto-fill blogs with pre-prepared generic comments. Some enterprising individuals offer blog commenting services: you can buy hundreds of dofollow comments left on blogs with your choice of keyword anchor text.

It is one of the easiest ways to get your link up on a webpage but this mass fetish with dofollow links conditions webmasters or marketers into thinking that blog comments should only be used for the sole purpose of getting immediate benefits like backlinks.

“Well, a link is a link. It’s better than nothing.” So they think to themselves at the end of an hour spent clicking on the auto-fill button and paraphrasing articles to make comments look ‘natural’. Don’t want to trip the spam filter now, do we?

Everything is streamlined towards one goal, to get that keyword link up. The bulk of one’s efforts are spent running some crappy do-follow search tool so one can go over and ejaculate comments on hundreds of blogs, discarding most of them once the deed is done.

Such promiscuity. And perhaps, such a waste of time and money. Why? Because these dofollow comments are junk compared to a high quality link recommendation within a relevant blog post. A blog post providing exposure that may result in a snowball of more citation links.

To be fair, the tactic of using dofollow blog comments as a link building tool is not entirely useless. They can direct some juice to websites you don’t care about, the ones you don’t intend to develop as a reputable brand. Basically, adsense or affiliate sites where you just want visitors to go in and come out via your referral link or ad click.

But even in these and other scenarios, blog comments can do more than just give you a few easy links. After all if your goal is to rank well in search engines, you should be pursuing a method that gives you a higher returns on investment. And such a method exists.

But to achieve that, you need to first do two things:

1. Abandon the obsession with dofollow comments. Focus on all blogs equally even if they have ‘nofollow’ turned on and don’t directly influence your rank. Blogs you comment on should only be selected based on factors such as their relevance and audience size.



2. Use blog comments as a first step to get more. Comments should be a preliminary and foundational step in an overall link + traffic building strategy. They are part of an overall plan to extract more valuable links from selected targets in the long run.

I used to think that in order to build links to my new niche site, I should just go find dofollow blogs and comment spam them. That’s all they were good for. After I gained some experience in site building and marketing, I eventually dropped this myopic focus on link building. I realized that there’s a much better way to use blog comments.

I’m not even talking about warm and fuzzy stuff like ’contributing to the discussion‘ or sharing knowledge, even though that’s a nice thing to do. I’m talking about a better way to use comments to get long term links that are better than dozens of dofollow blog comments.

You must be wondering: is there really more to blog commenting as a link building method?

The answer is yes. Having been a newbie before and gone down this path, I will offer some useful advice: If you only see blog commenting as a way to get instant links, you’re not maximizing their full potential. You are missing out on a lot of good stuff.

From my point of view, comments should be used holistically within a masterplan for getting what you really need: direct link recommendations from bloggers or site owners with a loyal audience, sending you high quality visitors that will convert well.

That’s the jackpot to aim for. That’s the ultimate goal. Not a bunch of approved comments with your precious keywords on a hundred semi-irrelevant blogs. Or even a thousand.

I’m not going to leave you high and dry. Next week, I will give you the exact comment strategy I use to build new sites into reputable authorities in their niche.

You’ll learn how to integrate blog commenting into a marketing strategy that gives you quality links and traffic. If you don’t want to miss that, consider subscribing to dosh dosh.

So what do YOU think about using dofollow blogs as a link building method? Do you do it and how well does it work for you?

P.S. Please don’t pitch any dofollow products, blog lists, commenter tools or search engines in the comments below. As you can tell, I’m trying to de-emphasize link building/spamming via dofollow blogs. Just a note for those who love to drop links without reading the post. ( ^ _ ^)