I pledge to moderate all comments and reward quality commenters with dofollow backlinks.

What you can do to join the Dofollow Movement

1. Turn on comment moderation on your blog, and install a plugin that will filter comment spam.

2. Install a dofollow plugin.

3. Submit your dofollow blog to PageRush and add the HTML code for your badge.

2. Leave a comment below with a link to your site.

3. Follow @dofollow on Twitter. Anyone is welcome to follow, but @dofollow only follows people who have dofollow blogs. You follow? That means it is a great place to hang out find other dofollowers .

Checking to see if a blog is dofollow requires inspecting the HTML of the blog to check the links to commenters (see how to verify a dofollow blog). Furthermore, the list of dofollow blogs is always changing as blogs turn dofollow on and off. Since each blog’s HTML template can be different, the only reliable way to verify dofollow is to have a human check it. At PageRush, we have multiple humans check each link that is submitted. We strive to re-check each dofollow blog on a monthly basis to confirm that it is still dofollow.

1. Verifying nofollow on a blog using Internet Explorer

2. Verifying dofollow on a blog using Internet Explorer

3. Checking for nofollow using Firefox SearchStatus Add-on. This is by far the easiest way to check for nofollow.

What is “Dofollow”?

Dofollow refers to normal links that do not have the “nofollow” tag. Websites that do not use “nofollow” are called “dofollow”. Both types of links look exactly the same when you view a Web page. However, when you look at the HTML for a Web page (by viewing the text of the source file), you can tell the difference.

For example, this is a normal dofollow link:

<a href="http://www.adamloving.com">Adam Loving's Blog</a>

this is a nofollow link:

<a href="http://www.adamloving.com" rel="nofollow">Adam Loving's Blog</a>

Why was “nofollow” invented?

In the beginning, all links were dofollow. Search engines (such as Google) ranked pages based on the number of dofollow links that pointed to them. Spammers soon learned this and targeted any site giving away free links (like blogs with un-moderated comments and bookmark sites) to increase their page’s rank by linking to themselves.

In an effort to discourage spammers, the nofollow tag was invented to indicate an un-approved link. Nofollow tells the search engine not to follow the link, denying the spammer any increase in page rank. As of 2009, nearly all blog software marks all comments (whether moderated or not) as nofollow.

Does nofollow stop spam?

No. Nofollow keeps search engines from rewarding spam, but it doesn’t stop the spammers from trying. As we all know from using email, simply not reading the spam doesn’t stop the spammers from sending it.

“Wikipedia has decided to nofollow all external links to help offset people spamming the service. In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.”

- Matt Mullenweg, inventor of Wordpress

Why is dofollow better than nofollow?

Not only does nofollow fail to stop spam, it denies honest commenters and site participants a small but important reward. A normal dofollow link is a nice reward to a person who contributed a thoughtful remark on your site. Making your site dofollow, telling others that it is dofollow, and rewarding commenters will motivate more visitors to spend time on your site and provide valuable comments.

How do I make my blog dofollow?

We are working on a dofollow plugin for Wordpress here at PageRush, but in the meantime, try one of these. Also, CommentLuv and Show Top Commenters are a popular way to reward comments.

How does commenting on a dofollow blog promote my Web site?

Most blog software creates a link to your Web site when you comment on a blog post. Links bring people to your site when they click the link, but each link can also count as a “vote” for your site with search engines. These votes increase your page rank and make your site appear closer to the top in search engine result pages. Dofollow blogs create normal links that count as a vote for your site.

Will making my blog dofollow encourage spammers?

Yes, especially if you promote it. Likely spammers will discover your blog as a source of valuable dofollow links. However just like email, you can set up your blog to filter out the spam.

How can I protect my blog against spam?

For Wordpress, we highly recommend the Akismet plugin. In our experience it hides more than 90% of blog comment spam.

We also recommend that you set a minimum content length on your comments. You can use the minimum comment length plugin to require all comments have a certain number of words. This will help with the annoying “Great post!” comments.

Also, we recommend not getting an email for every message, just visit every couple of days and moderate the comments in bulk. Finally, make sure your blog holds comments that hold more than 1 link in the comment body (this is easy to configure in Wordpress).

How can I tell if a site is dofollow?

Basically, just select “view source” from your browser’s menu to look at the HTML. Look for links that have <a rel=”nofollow”>Joe Commenter</a>. If you see that, the blog is nofollow (bad) not dofollow (good). You can also find Firefox plugins and hacks that will highlight nofollow links.

Using Windows Internet explorer

1. Find the comments on the blog

2. Look at an individual comment. Usually, there is a link to the author of the comment.

3. Right click on the page and select “View Source”

4. Type ctrl-f and search on the name of the commenter.

5. Look in the anchor tag for “nofollow”.

Using FireFox on Mac (same instructions for Windows)

If you want to spot links without viewing the HTML source, find an existing comment and right click on the link to the commenter. Again, you want to find links without “nofollow”.

1. Find the comments on the blog

2. Look at an individual comment. Usually, there is a link to the author of the comment.

3. Right click on the link to the commenter, and select “properties”.

4. Firefox will pop open a window that tells you if the link is nofollow. If it doesn’t say nofollow, it is considered dofollow.

How do I find Dofollow sites?

The PageRush guide to dofollow resources is coming soon.

How do I tell people about my dofollow blog?

Add your site to the PageRush dofollow blog list. Once it is accepted, it will be searchable and also published to the world in our dofollow RSS feed.

1. Pick a good background image from iStockPhoto or DeviantArt

• make sure you’re legal (pay for the image, or check the rights)
• pick something that makes for a nice background (not foreground)
• make sure the interesting part of the image is in the upper left (see next point)
• pick an image that fades to a solid color on the bottom and right edges

2. Customize your image. I like to use Skitch and Pixelmator for this.

• you may need to stretch your image so that it works as a background, or fade the edges to a solid color.
• you can text on their background image (a company logo or “about me” blurb)

3. Upload your image and choose background colors to match the solid color at the right and bottom of the image. This will give the appearance that your image goes on forever.

Once you’ve customized your profile, post a comment below to get feedback from others.

…attracting traffic on a blog requires hard work, great content, and social interaction outside the blog. There’s also the time factor: most blogs take a good 6-9 months to truly establish themselves, not just in building traffic, but in building incoming links and good treatment in search engines. Take The Inquisitr for example: we did more traffic in the first 13 days of this month than we did for the full total of our first 3 months.

- 10 myths of blog marketers debunked

To get a sense of how to use analytics to uncover your website’s flaws and make more money, we asked a fast-growing start-up to let three online-marketing experts review its analytics reports.

Improving Your Sense of Site – web analytics – Bonobos