*The following tip was shared by Eric Gesinski who runs a Tulsa SEO company*
Note from Ann: please don’t spam 
Only comment when you have anything worth saying!
One of the most well-known methods of off-site linking for SEO is blog commenting. However, to really get a solid boost in SEO, there’s one detail that is not always mentioned when this SEO tactic is shared: most blogs are nofollow. That is, they have the “nofollow” tag for the link from each commenter’s name. This fact means that the anchor text used (in the name) is not usually going to help raise your ranking for that keyword.
Because of this, if you’re interested in making sure your blog commenting will help raise keyword rankings, it’s better to find “dofollow” blogs, or blogs that do not have the “nofollow” tag. Here are two ways to do this:
- Find a directory of dofollow blogs. There are a few of these out there, and not all of them are updated regularly (or have high quality blogs available), but an easy way to find them is to simply type in “follow blogs” or “do follow blogs” into Google. Many of these results will list blogs that do not have the “nofollow” tag, and can be used to rank for your keywords with anchor text by commenting on these blogs. My recommendation is to make sure you keep relevant to the blogs you comment on for your keywords, as it’s easier to have comments accepted for keyword names that fit with the blog you comment on, although some SEOs will comment on any follow blog they can find.
- Manually check for the nofollow tag. This can take some time, so my recommendation is to install a good tool such as SEO for Firefox that can let you see nofollow links immediately, without needing to view the code source. There is an option in SEO for Firefox that will actually highlight all nofollow links in red when you have it active. This can save you a lot of time when you’re checking blog comments to see if they are nofollow. (You can find more tools to see nofollow links on this earlier post by Ann.)
Remember, if you are commenting on nofollow blogs, your anchor text will not have the boost that it could if you comment on dofollow blogs. If your intent is to build SEO for specific keywords by blog commenting, it’ll help the time you spend to find dofollow blogs for the SEO for your anchor text, as opposed to putting anchor text into comments on nofollow blogs that will not help your listings.
Good tip. But shouldn’t a person reading this blog know how to do a simple search in Google for finding dofollow blogs? I don’t know if this blog is a dofollow, nofollow, allfollow neverfollow sometimefollow, or what follow. But I like commenting on blogs when I want to opine on something. Thanks. By the way, I like most of your blog posts.
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Eric Reply:
January 26th, 2010 at 6:18 am
I personally like commenting on blogs when I want to make a comment, regardless of whether or not it’s a nofollow blog. But this is more for those out there who actively search for blogs to comment on for SEO purposes - hopefully they still contribute something worthwhile and don’t just spam (like Ann said). And thanks for your comment!
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Irvan Reply:
February 12th, 2010 at 2:10 am
Need hard jobs to find dofollow blog i think. I agree with you
I dont really care dofollow or not, i just like to leave comment in other blog. Sorry for bad language.
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Hello Ann
I’ve been reading your blogs for a long time and never had a chance to say your seo tips are always great & insightful so thanks very much for that!
I’m currently applying the technique specified above and it works fine but i have one question.
What if the links you find (e.g this one: http://goo.gl/Yv0e) doesn’t have any comments yet and that you can’t find any other articles with comments on the site. Is there a way to know if the hypothetical links in a future comment would be do followed or not?
Info about no follows are usually hosted within the php, which is not viewable in the page source so i was wondering whether there was a workaround?
It wouldn’t be worth it spending e.g 20 minutes to request a link for a client if we realize afterwards that the links were no-followed!
Hope it makes sense
Charly
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I like the suggestion to search in Google. Too many times we complicate things only to have a “duh” moment when we think about typing it into Google and searching. One thing I’d like to point out, though, is that this is not really a good strategy for building SEO, particularly for large companies. It’s time consuming with sometimes very little (if any) return. It’s better to spend time building your own linkworthy content and developing relationships with blog owners - particularly blog owners in your space - than spending time potentially spamming the few dofollow blogs.
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Eric Reply:
January 26th, 2010 at 10:11 pm
Shari - great comment. I completely agree with you on this. However, as time-consuming as it is, some people still use blog commenting as a main SEO tactic. This post is for those people who prefer that as a tactic, since it’s relatively easy to do and doesn’t take the time that relationship-building takes. I agree with you, though - good SEO does take time, especially for larger companies (and more difficult keyword phrase targets).
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really thanks! great for link building!
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I agree do follow blog comments are really helpful and checking is necessary because no follow commenting is useless.
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Do-Follow blogs are seems to be more index able rather than no-follow. But no follow links also have some potential. I always keep balance do follow and no follow so that it make some sense
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Do you know about Google actively trying to penalyze people who do comments spam?
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/11/hard-facts-about-comment-spam.html
And I think it will get even worse, so commenting on dofollow blogs just for link juice is a no-no in my opinion.
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I have a requirement to highlight the dofollowlink in my webpage automatically. meaning, when i (admin) open the site, i want to find if there is any dofollow link in my own page.
i used seo quake firefox plugin, it is helpful, however, it is cached and not updating on refresh. Is there any other way?
thanks
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See this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687
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well good posting, dofollow blog comments are good way to improve your backlinks also get some visits to your site, but if you post on nofollow blog comments, its not bad lil traffic somes to your site i think am not wrong ?
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its nice to see there are stilla lot of do-follow links out there. a lot of site now are stopping the do-follow unless you pay for them. so thank you to all the sites still leaving a do-follow link available. and a very nice informational post. thank you again
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Eric Reply:
March 1st, 2010 at 7:59 pm
I do love that you left a comment about praising do-follow blogs with a keyword anchor text name in a nofollow comment. The irony is thick and both entertaining and confusing. Thanks!
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Actually i do care that is it dofollow or not because it is very important to get higher page rank.
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dofollow is better than nofollow, but nofollow links is better than none~
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its really good and informative site. thanks
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Great post! This is the first time I am visiting your site… Its cool and I like your template. More over, the quality of your posts are just awesome! You really put a lot of effort into it, Don’t you?
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I use Fast Blog Finder though. It automates the same thing!
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