Posted on May 21, 2008 - by Nate

Link Prosititution: doFollow, noFollow, and the Selling of Back Links.

I remember watching an episode of Sienfeld where George is driving around New York looking for a place to park. I can’t remember who was with him, but whoever it was suggested that he just find a paid parking space. George jabbed back with, “that’s like prostitution. Why would I pay for something I could get for free if I just apply myself.” This applies well to backlinks to your website.

Do Work Son

I recently posted an article about the benefit of posting comments to blogs. In the article I spoke of the necessity of creating as many backlinks as possible for the spiders to pick up. This is where reading, and posting relevant content to high profile blogs becomes important. This is where the work is. So, if you’re interested in increasing your site’s rank on the major search engines, then start commenting. There is one problem, however. If the site you’re commenting on does not allow noFollow links. If this is the case, the spiders will not be able to archive your site’s URL in the search engine. This is a problem.

doFollow vs. noFollow

dofollow
A website can direct a search engine spider to follow a link that appears on it. The idea being that the target website’s ranking will influence the website indexed. dofollow attribute values are most often used on user generated sites whose traffic is not super high.

nofollow
A website can direct a search engine spider not to follow a link that appears on it. The idea being that the target website’s ranking will not influence the website indexed. nofollow attribute values are most often used on sites with user generated content, like user comments and blogs.

So, what can you do about noFollow links? Nothing really. You can try to avoid them as much as possible. How do you know if a site has a noFollow plugin installed? Well, if it’s a super high traffic blog, chances are it does. Some of the backlink trackers show whether or not the site that is linked to you has a noFollow plugin installed.

The sad thing is that this usually does not change the fact that these high traffic sites still get just as many spamming messages sent to their comments folder. However, it does change the fact that your website will not be linked to the site you’ve posted on. In fact, as I was thinking about all this I just happened to read an article yesterday by Brian Chappell outlining the problem with purchasing links perfectly (I call this link prostitution).

The following are 9 reasons you should be worried if you are buying links:

1. You are buying links through a network

2. You are buying links in chunks, 3-5 at a time on one page.

3. You are buying all your links on sidebar, footer locations.

4. Your entire niche buys links.

5. Your site sucks, as in no one in there right mind would naturally link to you.

6. All of your links have perfectly, articulated anchor text that simply looks fake.

7. You are not a 300+ Million dollar brand name.

8. You are doing really, really well in the SERPS, and rank in the top spot for a majority of the money terms.

9. 70+ % of your sites traffic comes from Google organic results

So, while buying links may be unnecessary, link exchanging and blog commenting is very necessary. It’s just super important that you make it effective by ensuring the site you are on allows doFollow backlinks. Good luck and happy SEO blogging.