Sugarcaned

Before I crack on with the site analysis of James's site I just wanted to write a little about the "NoFollow" link tag. For those unfamiliar with it, it's an invention from Google, designed to give webmasters the option of not leaking PR to every person that comments on their blog. The reason was to try and tackle comment spam and automatic commenting systems. Webmasters just had to add a "NoFollow" tag to links and Google wouldn't pass any PageRank onto the spamming sites.

It really didn't work. What it's done is make people very untrusting, lowered the traffic and commenting on blogs (let's face it, most blog readers are reading and commenting to promote their own site) and unfairly penalised legitimate SEO efforts.

So Google created a "DoFollow" tag to do the opposite. Generous webmasters could use this, and let people comment on their blog for SEO purposes. Any SEOer worth his salt would never spam, so comments from them are normally on topic and relevant to the blog. And it creates an active community of bloggers and commentators. And it goes back to one of the original ideas of the internet - linking.

The current situation with NoFollow has changed a little. Google does count "NoFollow" links. Whether or not they leak any PR is up for debate, but I think they do. I always use Wikipedia as a good example. Wikipedia have a strict NoFollow policy, but I've had pages jump up the rankings upon having a wikipedia entry added.

I think with the devaluing of PageRank that seemed to occur last year, the DoFollow / NoFollow debate matters less and less. Commenting on all blogs is useful and recommended. But if you really want to just stick with blogs that have a DoFollow, how do you find them?

Try this DoFollow blog search engine and type in your keywords and find blogs that have a DoFollow policy.

Happy SEOing!