Since making this blog dofollow 3 months ago, I’ve experienced a big rise in spam comments with over 2000 total spam comments being posted. Luckily Askimet seems very good at spotting spam so all I have to do is periodically press the Delete button to remove the scores of comments I seem to get every day. Still, it’s a monotonous job filtering out the good from the bad and I’ve considered going nofollow to discourage the spammers.
However, on balance, I think the reasons for being dofollow still stand. There are two main purposes:-
- It encourages people to make comments. In exchange for a decent comment, people get a good backlink. I’m only OKing good comments though and any comment where the author name is a keyword I delete straight away.
- People keep posting lists of dofollow blogs in various places - forums and other blogs for example - so from time to time I pick up backlinks. This is a pretty easy way of building links.
Having said that neither of these reasons for being dofollow are pretty strong. I’m still not getting many decent comments and the rate of link-building is low. If my PR drops in the next toolbar export or the rate of spam increases significantly in the next couple of months, I’ll probably go nofollow and hope the spam dies away.
General SEO
Back on my dofollow blog commenting tips post I gave some ideas on how to find dofollow blogs. One of the ideas I talked about was to simply search on Google for “list of dofollow blogs” to find lists of blogs other people had already put together. You can also use a dofollow blog search engine to search for blogs on particular topics.
Recently though I came across another way of finding dofollow blogs. There is a dofollow blog community called U COMMENT I FOLLOW. These blogs have dofollow comments and also display the following image on their website.
An easy way to blogs with this image is simply to search on Google for the words “u comment i follow”. Usually the blogs will have these words mentioned somewhere, often in the alt tag for the “u comment i follow” image. You can experiment by searching on the usual www.google.com search engine and on the images search engine http://images.google.com/.
Remember when commenting on blogs that links to your site from pages on relevant themes are likely to be worth more than those from irrelevant pages. To try and find dofollow blogs with relevant posts, you can experiment with combining search phrases, e.g. to find dofollow blogs related to software development, try searching for:
“u comment i follow” “software development”
This is an easy method of finding dofollow blogs. When you do find a dofollow blog, it will also be quite likely to link to other blogs that are dofollow so spend some time looking at the sites linked in the blogroll.
Remember though that any blog that is deliberately dofollow will also have an owner that is carefully vetting and moderating any comments. If you want your comment to be approved, make a quality comment rather than a short and spammy “Great post! Thanks for the info” type of comment. In my experience, comments where the author’s name is obviously a keyword, e.g. “seo tips” instead of “Dave” are very unlikely to be approved.
General SEO, Link-building
When I initially began optimising my main web site to improve the performance in SERPS I treated the exercise a bit like software engineering. I researched some keywords, mainly by looking at competitor sites, then wrote my web copy to include the main keywords plus a few long-tail variations. However, by no stretch of the imagination am I a salesman. I guess I wrote the web copy to include the keywords in various orders BUT I didn’t write copy that sells. I ran the text past a few people, including my wife, but these people weren’t marketing/ sales oriented either. Recently it’s been brought to my attention that my websites need rewriting to make them better selling tools. Here are the main tips I’ve been given:
Emphasise the Benefits
In order to get lots of keywords into a page, I tended to talk about features. Features are OK, but showing the benefits is really important. OK, so you can save a document to PDF but what really matters is that you can email your invoice, saving paper and postage and getting paid more quickly.
Build a Trustworthy Image
As my customer base grew I collected testimonials every now and again. I’d post the testimonials onto a page on my site but I could have made more use of them. For example, I could have placed testimonials directly onto the homepage so that new visitors would know they wouldn’t be alone in buying my products. The other thing I could have done is put the logos of larger, more well-known customers onto my homepage. These would be a quick visual cue to visitors that other big companies trusted me.
Have a Range of Products
The last major tip I was given was to increase the number of products on offer. With one, small product I could look like a bit of a hobbyist. With two, three or a complete range of products, I’d look more substantial and better able to give things like support and ongoing development.
Conclusion
When performing SEO, it needs to be part of an overall sales strategy. Not only do you need to get people to find your site, when they land there you need to be able to make a sale. You need to write Web copy that isn’t purely optimised for SEO. Your web copy needs to be clearly written, simple to follow and, most importantly, your copy needs to sell benefits to your customers.
General SEO