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I recently read a blog post written by a marketing consultant who set out a strategy for getting backlinks pointing to your blog. The strategy calls for posting thoughtful and relevant comments on authority blogs. When done correctly, this strategy operates as a “win-win” – the blog publisher gets additional content in the form of your comments and you get a backlink to your blog or web site.
This all makes sense except for one glaring admission – you must find blogs with the “no follow” attribute turned off. Otherwise your comments will not create any backlinks. Ironically the marketing consultant who described the blog comment strategy had “no follow” enabled on his blog!
What is “no follow?” No follow is an attribute that is now the default setting in WordPress. It signals Google and some other search engines not to follow a hyperlink, in this case, your link text. The blog publisher must turn off “no follow” in order to send his commenters a backlink.
In order to turn off “no follow” in WordPress, you need a plugin, which you can find by clicking on the link. Install the plug-in and activate it and your blog comments will become “follow links.”
Note that if you disable “no follow” your blog may attract some spam comments. This has not been an issue for me, even on high traffic blogs because:
I have not yet upgraded to WordPress 3.0 but it appears that this version allows you to turn “no follow” on or off a little easier than prior versions. However, if you are using a version of WordPress that defaults to “no follow” you may need the plugin.
Finally, you may be wondering how to determine if your blog is a “follow” or “no follow” blog. The easiest way to find out is to use a tool like NoDoFollow for Firefox. There are other tools out there but this is what I use.
