Since I check my Web stats obsessively, I thought I might as well share. I’ve been doing light SEO promotion for this site for the past couple months. Stats have just started showing up in Google Webmaster Tools. I’ve been targeting terms related to dofollow, dofollow search, and dofollow blogs. So I consider this a good opportunity for a snapshot.
Unfortunately, Google still isn’t showing many back links. Webmaster Tools reports 0 Pages with external links. A Google search for link:pagerush.com yields only about 10 results. As usual, Yahoo is much more forthcoming, showing inlinks from other domains at a healthy 386.
As long as this continues to get better on a week over week basis, I’m happy. Building a successful site is a combination of creating something remarkable, and promoting it intelligently. Oh, and one of these days I’ve got to get over and figure out how to better capitalize on the StumbleUpon phenomenon.
When setting out to do link building for this blog, I was quickly frustrated with the abundance of nofollow links I was getting. I sought out dofollow search engines and directories, but was disappointed. Each one I found had too few blogs listed, had nofollow blogs listed, or had only blogs with very low PageRank. So, I started a project to build an accurate list of dofollow blogs.
I collected over 2000 links from existing public sources and worked with a team of human judges to visit each blog and verify if it was dofollow. I have learned a lot and met a lot of great bloggers in the process. Not surprisingly, about half of the links we verified (which were supposedly dofollow) were actually nofollow.
Classifying blogs is not as easy as you might think. They must have comments. If they use a comment plug-in like Disqus, you have to verify that the commenter’s link goes to their blog, and not a Disqus profile page. Then there are plugins like Lucia’s Link Love that may allow dofollow links in the body of the post, or only allow dofollow links after a certain number of approved posts (I’ve been categorizing these as “somefollow”). And of course, any given blog could change at any time. So an important design consideration for this tool was to make it easy to re-check blogs on an ongoing basis.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, getting dofollow blog backlinks is not the only link building strategy you should consider. It is a strategy that mostly makes sense for new Web sites. Your site will only increase PageRank by getting links from sites that have a higher PageRank, so it makes sense to target blogs with a higher PageRank. Unfortunately this makes high PageRank sites more of a target, but we’ve found a healthy distribution of medium PageRank sites.
Lastly, I created a very basic categorization system for the blogs. Of course, when seeking backlinks from blogs it is best to comment in your area of expertise. Surprisingly, the largest categories are Technology and People. I would have thought that Marketing and Business blogs where the most likely to be giving away dofollow links, but I was wrong.
I finally launched my dofollow blog list today with over 800 blogs. This is the first of many features of the “PageRush Site Booster” tool. This is a paid subscription service. Go sign up and let me know what you think!
This short video demonstrates how to determine what sites link to yours. This is really basic stuff, but I thought it was worth showing because the number of links varies so dramatically. There is currently no way of knowing for sure what backlinks Google is counting, but comparing Yahoo to Google demonstrates just how many of the links you may think you are getting are actually nofollow.
In this video, I demonstrate how to remove the nofollow tags from your blogspot blog. To do this, you just need to change the default comment options and edit your template. Following this method to convert your blog to dofollow will increase the number of comments you get on your blog.
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You can evaluate the list using the 