What has the dog something to do with this article? Well, a lot.  Dofollow and nofollow has been awhile now but not a lot of people know the power of these link.

First off, what are dofollow and nofollow links? Ordinarily, all links are followed by search engine spiders. But this has been exploited and abused by BlackHat SEO practitioners to increase their page ranks and popularity. They do this by means of comment spamming and link flooding. As a result, most content on the Internet have been tainted by unrelated topics and links and information. (on a side note, I blame Google for announcing to the world that links help you rank higher) [my update: now Google rank sites higher without a ton of backlinks]. This is now what I believe is the separation of PR and SERP which I hopefully publish a new article on tomorrow if I’m not busy. Sad to say, this made the dofollow links as a BlackHat tool of choice.

Back to the Point

So to get back on point, nofollow links were created to stop, prevent, or minimize this practice. Because links are rendered useless to their ranking and search engines wont follow it, people that post comments on your blog have a greater chance of being related. Unfortunately, this hasn’t prevented people from posting unrelated links here. But fortunately, I can approve or decline comments before publishing it live. Right now, I have to approve almost a hundred comments that 90% are unrelated.

Putting Some White on the Black

In order to be considered a White Hat SEO practice, it must fall into these criteria:

1. Relevant - post on blog topics that are related to your links
2. Non-spammy – don’t flood comments.
3. Substantive - it also will look good to make it more like a sentence describing your target site than just posting a link.

So as a small plug and contribution to this wonderful world of SEO, nofollow, and dofollow, I’ve created a site to help spammers get off their itch to post their links on. It also has tons of articles ranging from art to travel to medical. So it is highly likely that your post will be on a related topic and the search engine will favor the quality of the article and your link will have more value when the spider crawls at it.