Feb

8

Recent DoFollow Blog Directory Changes

Filed Under Do-Follow Info | 31 Comments

I have made a number of significant changes to the DoFollow Blog Directory at FollowList.com.

I have blogged about those changes as I have made them, but I thought a short summary was in order since I think a number of users of the directory have missed the recent changes.

For those who have a blog listed in the blog directory:

1.  I am periodically going through blogs in the directory, in a random fashion.  If I review your blog, by looking at comments to see if it is truly dofollow, and if it is family appropriate, I will send a tweet about your blog.

I am sending the tweets from http://twitter.com/dofollowblogs .  This Twitter account is only a few weeks old, and it has 60 followers as of today.  I have no advertising of this Twitter account, other than on this blog and on the Followlist.com front page. So, I assume the followers of the Dofollow Blogs Twitter account are looking for dofollow blogs to comment on.

I expect this account to grow in followers over the next few months, so you could get a lot of eyeballs looking at your blog.

When I review your blog, using the criteria laid out above, if it fails my review I will suspend your blog, and of course not tweet about it.  Hopefully, this will encourage you to remain dofollow.

If you suddenly find your blog has disappeared from the directory, It’s probably because it has been suspended.  If you choose to turn remove nofollow and become dofollow, I will un-suspend your blog after I have manually reviewed it.

2.  Users of the dofollow list now have the ability to report blogs that violate the rules above (Is Dofollow and family appropriate). If your blog is reported, I will review your blog and either okay it, or suspend it.

3.  I have recently added a caching feature to the directory to speed it up.  One of the drawbacks of having a database driven website that gets a good amount of traffic, is that it starts to experience slow load times and database errors.

To solve this, the site now loads pages into a temporary cache, without accessing the database.  This improves load speed.  The only drawback, is that newly added blogs may not appear in the directory right away, it may take up to 10 minutes to appear.

For those of you using the list for finding blogs where you can leave comments:

1.  You now have the ability to report blogs that are not really dofollow.

As stated above, I am also tweeting about manually reviewed dofollow blogs.  You can receive 4-5 daily tweets about blogs that I have personally reviewed and verified to be dofollow.  Just follow http://twitter.com/dofollowblogs

I appreciate your help in cleaning up my dofollow list, to make it the cleanest free dofollow list.

2.  The site should now load faster, see point 3 above :-)

I hope to make some enhancements soon, like allowing blog owners to have their blogs flagged as using KeywordLuv, and/or CommentLuv.  As a user of the list, is this something you would like to see?

Jan

22

I Will Send You Tweets of DoFollow Blogs

Filed Under Do-Follow Info | 32 Comments

I have made another change to the Followlist.com DoFollow Blog Directory.

I will be sending Twitter Tweets of blogs in the directory that I have verified to be DoFollow.

This is good news for you if you are looking for DoFollow blogs to comment on.

Unfortunately, some blogs in the DoFollow list are actually nofollow blogs. In order to cleanup the directory and weed out dead blogs and nofollow blogs, I have asked users to report those blogs as they come across them.

In addition, I am randomly reviewing blogs in the directory a number of times a day. As I come across valid dofollow blogs, I will tweet you about them. If they are not dofollow, I will be suspending them.

So, when you follow my Twitter Tweets, you will know that blogs mentioned in those tweets have been verified as being dofollow.

If you have a blog in the DoFollow Blog Directory that has been verified to be a dofollow blog, I will be tweeting your blog.

Initially, I thought about tweeting new blogs as they were submitted to the Followlist.com dofollow blog list, but that would not have been fair to those who have been a member of the list for some time.

So, I will be randomly choosing blogs throughout the day that are dofollow and are family appropriate. All dofollow blogs will be tweeted about once, until all are done, and then I will start the process again.

So, follow me at http://twitter.com/dofollowblogs and keep a look out for your blog.

By the way, if you discover that your blog is no longer in the directory, it is probably because it was tagged as a nofollow blog. The database still contains your blog information, and your blog can be added back into the dofollow list if you make your blog dofollow. Just contact me at my Helpdesk and let me know your blog is now dofollow and provide me with your blog link. If I verify that your blog is dofollow, I will add it back into the directory.

Jan

13

Please Report Non DoFollow Blogs

Filed Under Do-Follow Info | 33 Comments

This has been a little late in coming, but you can now report blogs, in the Followlist.com DoFollow Blog Directory, that are not dofollow.

Since it is impossible for me to monitor all the blogs in the directory, I need your help flagging those blogs. Below each blog, you will see a “Report Blog As DoFollow or Inappropriate” link.

Clicking on this link will open a new window that will allow you to submit that blog for review. I will then review the blogs and either suspend them from the blog list, or okay them as being dofollow and appropriate.

Suspended blogs will no longer be shown in the directory. Blogs that I okay will remain in the directory, but will have been identified as having been reported in the past.

As you are visiting blogs in the dofollow blog list, please report blogs that are nofollow, are not family friendly, or go to a dead site.

When flagging a site you think it is nofollow, please make sure you have actually looked at comments on the blog and have made sure those comments are indeed nofollow.

Here are some ways to find out if the blog comment links are dofollow or nofollow.

Thank you for your help in making the Followlist.com DoFollow Blog Directory, the best DoFollow Blog Directory – and keeping it free!

Jan

6

Deleting Dofollow Blog Comments

Filed Under Do-Follow Info | 40 Comments

Dofollow Blog Commenting

First of all, here’s to a happy and prosperous 2010 to you!

Over the last few weeks, I have been going through the comments on the blog, and deleting a ton of them.

For those of you who have made great comments – thank you, and I’m sorry your great comments have been over shadowed by the all too many crappy comments that seem to dominate popular do follow blogs.

My goal is to login each day and delete the comments that need to be deleted. This is not my favorite task, and a task that adds no money to my pocket, but it needs to be done daily. Bear with me if I miss a few days.

After reading through a lot of comments, I am seeing a trend of comments that I will be deleting.

First, I have seen a lot of comments similar to “Do follow blogs is a great thing in the field of SEO.” or “Thanks for the DoFollow blog list”. These are comments that I have allowed in the past, but I will no longer be allowing.

This type of comment is relevant, but it is too short and does not really add any value to the blog comments. It suggest you really do read the post you are commenting on, and then leave 2-3 sentences of content that are relevant and make sense if you want your comment approved.

I have also seen a lot of those commenting leaving links in their comments. If you have read my dofollow blog comment rules, you will find that I do not allow links in the comments.

Here is the rule:
“4. Don’t use your comments to list every website you own. After leaving some good comments, don’t blatantly advertise your other websites. I’m already giving you an incoming link with your selected anchor text. If you add additional websites, I probably won’t approve your comments.

If you add a website in the comments that is directly related to the discussion, even if it’s yours, I will allow it. If I think you are just trying to get more links, I won’t allow it.”
————

I am already giving you a dofollow link with your chosen keyword text in the title, don’t take advantage of me by trying to get one in the comment text. Unfortunately, I have deleted some good comments because they included a link in their comment, advertising another of their websites. The only exception is if the website is relevant to the topic and contains information what will help others. I have found that this is rarely the case.

So remember, keep the comments good – about 2-3 sentences related to the blog post topic, and don’t include links in the comments and you will probably be approved, giving you a long term incoming link.

In a few days I will be posting about how the Followlist.com Dofollow Blog List is about to get even better.

Dec

7

Get The Most out of the Dofollow Blog Directory

Filed Under Do-Follow Info | 74 Comments

This is a post that I should have written some time ago.  I appreciate those who have added their dofollow blogs and have made the FollowList Dofollow Blog Directory a success.

I want to make sure that those who have added their blogs to get the most out of their listing.

I also want to take a moment to ask those who are adding their nofollow blogs to the list to please stop.  I am working on processes to identify and remove nofollow blogs, so may as well not waste your time adding them.

Too many blog owners are adding their blogs, without taking advantage of the blog directory name and description.  Following is a screen shot of the fields to complete when adding your blog.

Dofollow Blog Directory

Dofollow Blog Directory

Blog Name

The Blog Name is for your use, and is not seen in the directory listing.  It is used to help you identify your blogs.  By the way, you are allowed to have multiple dofollow blogs on the same Followlist account.

Blog Description

The Blog Description is the short description of your blog that will be the title of your blog listing.  It is best to use your main keyword for the blog description.  I see too many people not taking advantage of this field.

This will be the hyperlinked text to your blog, and is a dofollow link.  Choose your blog description wisely.

Blog URL

The Blog URL is self explanatory.

Short URL

A Short URL is assigned to your listing by default.  However, you can also define your own URL name, as long as the name is not already in use.

Dofollow Blog Category

Please place your blog in the proper Category, so those looking for blogs in your niche can find your blog.  The first category, Advertising, has several blogs in it that are not related to advertising.

Since it’s the first category and selected by default, I guess it’s easiest to just leave it a Advertising.  If your blog is not in the proper category, you are loosing visitors because they can’t find your blog.

In the future, I will make Misc the default category.

Blog Long Description

Blog Long Description should be used to give a 2-5 sentence description about what your blog is about.  You can leave this blank, but you shouldn’t.

New blogs and popular blogs are listed on the Followlist.com home page, but those with no long description are not listed.  This can be a PR3 Dofollow link for you if you fill out a good description.

In the future, I will probably tie a category selection, and a blog long description minimum length, to obtain a front page listing, rewarding those who take a few minutes to create a good listing.

Hopefully, this will help you get the most out of your dofollow blog listing.

Jun

5

Hiring Out DoFollow Blog Comments

Filed Under Do-Follow Info | 279 Comments

I get Google Alerts on the term “DoFollow Blogs” to keep up with what is going on in the dofollow blog world.  If you don’t know about Google Alerts, I have written a post about how I use Google Alerts to monitor keywords.

For a while I’ve been seeing a number of people looking to hire someone to do their dofollow blog commenting for them.

Commenting on dofollow blogs can be a tedious task, and I have considered hiring someone to do my commenting.  I have seen offers of around $70 to $100 for 100 comments, which seems to be a reasonable price.

Is it a good idea to free up your time to take care of more important things, by having someone building links by commenting on dofollow blogs?

It may be a good idea for you, but there are risks involved.  If you are going to have someone else represent you by commenting with links going to your site, you need to be clear on what you are expecting of that person.

I would be clear about how many comments I want per day.  You don’t want all 100 links done in one day, but rather have them spread out over 2-4 weeks.

You want to make sure your person for hire knows where you want those links placed.  Do you want them on blogs related to your niche?  Do you want them on blogs related to your niche, and they must be dofollow blogs?

Do you want them on dofollow blogs only, preferably related to your niche, but some may be in other niches?  What percentage could be in other niches?

Are there niches you don’t want your comments placed on?  Make sure to spell out where you don’t want them posted.

Do you have Google PR requirements?  For example 20% on PR 4 or above, 30% on PR2 and PR3 and the rest on PR1 and above.

Are you going to provide the blogs to comment on, or are you doing to ask your hire to do that?

Do you require the comments be a certain length?  Perhaps a minimum of 150 characters?

I would be clear that you expect those comments to be quality comments, related to the post.

I would also provide keywords that you want your person to use for the website title, and provide them with the actual links you want them to use.

How are you going to monitor, or spot check, that good comments are being created?  Are you going to ask your person for hire to provide a list of all posts they comment on?

Wow, that’s a lot to ask of someone to do blog commenting, for me anyway.  I really don’t know if I could find someone to do my commenting for around $1 per comment, with all my requirements.

I guess that’s why I’m not hiring out dofollow blog comments.  Plus, I don’t know that I could trust anyone to represent me and my business when it comes to commenting on blogs.  So, I’ll just continue doing it myself.

Mike

May

27

Should I Remain DoFollow?

Filed Under Do-Follow Info | 201 Comments

I have noticed the crap comments on my blog going up recently.  It seems that commenting on dofollow blogs has become a popular link building strategy.

The problem is people are hiring out their blog commenting, or using automated tools to post generic comments that don’t relate to the blog post, or add any value to the blog posts.

This has caused me to question whether I should continue to keep this blog dofollow.  Since this blog is all about dofollow, it would make sense to keep the comments dofollow.

But, there may come a point in time, and it may be soon, that I will have to go nofollow due to the time it takes to monitor and delete crappy comments.

Recently, one of my favorite blogs, Untwisted Vortex, went from dofollow back to nofollow due to people leaving garbage for comments.

I absolutely understand why he needed to do that, and I’m afraid more dofollow blog owners will go back to nofollow because they are starting to get more bad comments than good comments.

For now, I will leave this blog as a dofollow on comments.  But, I will no longer automatically post comments and then come back and delete those comments that are bad.  I will now leave comments in moderation and only publish those that are quality comments.

This may lead to a few day delay in approving good comments since I moderate comments about every other day.

If you are using commenting on blogs as a link building strategy, I will say it again – Please respect the blog owner and leave good, quality comments.  Good comments will also help you improve the chances of someone visiting your site.

Mike

Mar

12

DoFollow Blog Backlink Strategy Part 2

Filed Under Do-Follow Info | 148 Comments

This is part #2 of the post related to the dofollow blog backlink strategy and if it really works.

In part one of dofollow backlink strategy, Robert was questioning whether his dofollow blog backlink strategy was working.  By looking at the Yahoo backlinks to Roberts site, I found a good number of links pointing back to his blog.

So, I have to question if Robert is thinking his backlink strategy is not working because he is not seeing the traffic he is expecting.

If a lack of traffic is Roberts gauge of success, there may be a few reasons Robert is not seeing a return on his dofollow blog backlink time investment.  Here are the suggestions I gave Robert, with some detail added.

1. Make sure you are using keywords you want to target in the comment title. First look at some comments on the blog to make sure the blog owner allows keywords. Some only approve proper names.  I tend to shy away from dofollow blogs that only allow me to use proper names.  If they allow keyword titles, or they use the KeywordLuv plugin, make sure you use the keywords you are wanting to target.

2. If you are targeting keywords that are too competitive, you are fighting a loosing battle.  For example, if Robert is using a generic keyword such as “politics” for his keywords, he will never rank well due to the amount of competition he will have to face.  He will need to use more targeted keywords that have less competition to get on the first page of Google.

4.  Use different keywords.  If you use the same exact keyword on all blog commenting you do, Google may get suspicious and it may hurt you.  Change up your keywords so you have a variety of related keywords going to your blog.

5.  Don’t always use your main blog for the Website.  Use individual post URLs for some of your comments.  This is often called deep linking, and will help Google find individual posts, and send traffic to them.  Spread those links around to several pages (posts) on your site.

6. Make sure you leave quality comments so your comments are approved.  I delete about half the comments left on my blog.  It’s usually because they are not related to the post being commented, so I know they never read the blog post.  Or, the comment is just a short comment that adds absolutely no value to the blog post.  Don’t waste your time commenting on blogs if you’re not going to do it right.  Make good comments that will get approved.

7. Don’t just comment on the same blogs. It’s okay to comment on the same blogs over and over, especially if they have a Top Commentors plugin installed.  But, you also need to spread your comments out over multiple blogs.

I would also give Robert one more suggestion.  If I were going to spend the time building a lot of backlinks to a website, I would want to do it to a website that I had total control over.  Robert has done a lot of work, created a lot of unique content on Blogger.com.

If it were me, I would move the content to a Wordpress blog on my own domain and web host.  You can get a domain for less than $10 per year and web hosting for less than $7 per month.  With your own domain, web host and Wordpress blog you have more control over your website and you can do more with it.

I hope Robert and Sally don’t mind me using their comments for this post about dofollow blog backlink strategy.  They do get a link back to their sites, so that should help :-)

Your comments are always welcome, and who knows, your quality comments may lead me to do a post related to your comments and you may get a link back to your site in a blog post – another reason to leave good and related comments.

Mike

Mar

11

Is Your DoFollow Backlink Strategy Working?

Filed Under Do-Follow Info | 123 Comments

I have had a couple of great questions and comments lately that I have answered in comments, but thought I would elaborate on the questions/comments here.

The question had to do with the dofollow blog backlink strategy and if it really works.

As I started writing this post, it got to be pretty long, so I will have divided it into two parts.

This is part #1.

Robert from The Silent Majority asked the question below.
“I have been aggresively pursuing the do follow philosophy. As of yet I have not seen much of a return on my time investment. As I am new at this I assume that I am doing something wrong, any suggestions.”

Sally of Fast Flat Sale was good enough to respond to Robert’s question below.
“Answer to Robert, I too have been commenting on do-follow websites for nearly a month now. I have built up over 1500 backlink in yahoo but only 4 backlinks in Google. I’m not sure why but I know it won’t be an overnight thing, it does take abit of time.”

First of all, Sally is doing the right thing by monitoring the number of backlinks that she is getting.  She knows how many backlinks she is building by checking with Yahoo and Google.  How would you know if your backlink strategy is working, or not, if you aren’t looking at backlink numbers periodically.

Sally also notes a big difference between the number of backlinks Yahoo reports and the number Google reports.  I believe this is normal.  It’s my understanding that Yahoo is a better gauge of actual backlinks, because Google does not want to give too much backlink info away.

So, my suggestion to Robert is to first find out how many backlinks you have from Yahoo. Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ Input your blog into the top Explore URL box.

In the Results you will see the number of pages Yahoo has indexed, and Inlinks, the number of sites pointing back to your site.

Click on the Inlinks button, then I like to select “Except from This Domain” in the Show Inlinks Box, and “Entire Site” in the To box.  This will give you the number of links Yahoo sees pointing to your site from all sites excluding links pointing to other pages on the same site.

When I do this to Robert’s site, I see he does have a good number of links pointing back to his site.  So, it could be Robert is not seeing the results of the backlinks, in terms of visitors, that he is expecting.

Tomorrow, I will finish with part #2 of this discussion on whether the dofollow blog backlink strategy really works.  I will detail what I suggest, to make sure you get the most out of your dofollow blog comments.

Mike

Feb

13

New DoFollow Blog Comment Strategy

Filed Under Do-Follow Info | 208 Comments

If you are thinking about commenting on this dofollow blog, I welcome and value your comments.

You do need to know that I monitor the comments closely, and I do delete comments that are not related to the post topic.

The reason I have to monitor comments closely, is there will always be people who try to cheat the system.

By reading comments posted to this blog, I recently discovered a new dofollow blog comment strategy.  If you have a dofollow blog, you need to know about this new strategy.  If you comment on dofollow blogs, I will have some advice for you.

I noticed an interesting comment on this blog.  The comment stated “Is generating dofollow blog backlink traffic really worth the time and effort that it takes to make quality comments on dofollow blogs? Does it really work? I am a strong advocate of dofollow blogs, which is why I blog about it, and I can tell you that my experience tells me that it does work.”

I thought, that sure sounds familiar.  Of course it was familiar, it was the first paragraph of a post I made on this very blog a few days ago – see  Dofollow Blog Backlink Traffic.

This comment was not left on the above post, it was left as a comment on a different blog post.

So, it appears someone is extracting the first paragraph of a post, then posting that as a comment on a different post of the same blog, to get a backlink that looks like a valid comment.

I am guessing this is an automated, or semi-automated process that was designed to post a lot of comments in a short period of time.  This is a very clever strategy, and would have gone unnoticed if I didn’t actually read my blog comments.

But, I did catch it and this person will not get a backlink from me because I consider this – blog comment spam.  This time I just deleted the comment, if I see it again from the same person, I will flag it as spam.  If I start seeing it used more often by different people, I will flag them all as spam.

If your blog is a dofollow blog, you really need to watch your comments closely and not let people take advantage of you giving them a backlink.  Don’t reward people who are trying to cheat the system.

If you comment on dofollow blogs and are tempted to try something similar, don’t do it.  Sooner or later you will be discovered, and your blog comments will be flagged as spam.  Then your blog comments will disappear, and you will only have yourself to blame.

Mike

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I support the Do Follow movement and allow comments with Do Follow. Comments are monitored and I will delete comments that do not add value to the current post. See My DoFollow Blog Rules.

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