One of my readers, Caleb, asked about the benefits and differences of nofollow and dofollow links for Internet marketing.

Overal, dofollow is obviously the best type of backlink because it passes link juice from one site to another and counts the anchor text for keyword relevance, but, do not discount the nofollow completely!

The original meaning of the nofollow attribute as created by Google means:

• Not follow through to that page to crawl its content
• Not count the link in calculating Page Rank.
• Not count the anchor text in determining what keywords the page being linked to is relevant for.

Now, this basically means that the nofollow tag in backlinks will not pass any link juice to your website or blog, will not help to index your site, nor will the content of the page you are linking to be crawled, as a result of being found on that page where the nofollow link is, nor will any relevancy be given to your website for the keywords used in the anchor.

Do all the search engines treat nofollow the same way?

Google emphatically states, as the creator of the nofollow tag that, the nofollow attribute complies will all the characteristics stated above. No crawl of content, no link juice passed, no keyword relevancy and no index as a result of that backlink. Google simply does not follow the link at all!

Yahoo says, that “If we find a link we make it available to our algorithms to find new content, whether it has a ‘no follow’ attribute or not. However, if the ‘no follow’ attribute is present, it means that no attribution is given to the target from the source of the link.”

This means Yahoo will crawl and will index the content, but will not pass link juice.

MSN Live stated they are on board with all the parameters of the nofollow attribute as stated above.

Ask.com, completely ignores the nofollow

Is what they say truth or fiction? Well, if you do some research around the blogosphere, (with the exception of Ask) you will find conflicting results, as some have tested and found results that contradict these statements by Yahoo and Google. In fact, many believe that Google sometimes does follow the nofollow links, and that Yahoo ignores the nofollow all together. Is this true, possibly, but it in reality it doesn’t matter! Do I care? No! Will I spend my valuable time doing this research? No! Because I’d rather spend it building links.

In essence you want to have both types of links because:

1. Only getting do-follow links will look un-natural and could cause alarms to go off. When building links you want to look as natural as possible and get a variety of links from all types of sources.

2. Getting a high Page Rank nofollow link is better than no link at all.

3. All types of links can bring traffic, not the best buying kind, but good for subscibers, as from compelling comments on related blogs. Just as Caroline Middlebrook, she built a lot of her 4,000 + subscribers with a sound blog comment strategy.

4. If you focus all your time on researching where to get do-follow, you lose the valuable time to just build links, all kinds, all types.

5. Yahoo, though they say will not pass link juice or keyword relevance, still crawls and indexes websites from a nofollow link. And, ASK ignores it completely.

6. The SE’s can possibly lie, what a shocker

7. Many nofollow links are delivered with Google Alerts all the time, this is not earth shattering, but it tells me that Google is aware of those links. With some authority sites, like the socials, I can add a link and literally 1 hour later I get a Google Alert.

I have lots of nofollow links, some natural and some manual. But I never spend more than 5 minutes getting those manually. For example, a site offers me to build a mini site with my content and I can link back to my sites and the links are nofollow, I will pass because the time investment to build a mini site full of content is way more energy than I wish to spend for nofollow links. But, with Squidoo and Hub pages for example, the links are do-follow so the time is definitely worth it.

For article marketing, nofollow links have benefits as well, as some article sites are nofollow, but they are high PR, and other webmasters go there to get content to republish on their sites and this leads to getting more dofollow links from that article going viral.

So the lesson here people is just get links

Reading and commenting on blogs is necessary, fun, good for networking, good for backlinks and link building and we all do it. Here are some tools that will aid your blog commenting efforts.

DO NOT SPAM the blogs, read the posts and get involved in the conversation by providing quality comments, if you SPAM you will ruin for the rest of us and your comment will just get deleted.

Easy Comment Firefox Add-On - This is a must have! Automatically fills out blog comment forms with your name, email and url for the profiles you have pre-entered. And, if you comment on many blogs with different urls and keywords, this one will save you loads of time because it supports multiple profiles.

One click and the form is filled out, no more entering your information manually on each blog. The profile selector sits in your browser’s bottom status bar, right click and select a profile, click the easy comment icon and the profile you selected instantly goes into the comment form. Supports all blogging platforms.

Comment Sniper - If you want to be the first to comment, then this tool is for you. Gives real time alerts when the blogs you program into it update and so you can be the first to comment.

Finding Do-Follow Blogs:

Do-follow blogs are good for backlinks. By the way, do not ignore the no-follow blogs for comment backlinks, they are beneficial as well, because Yahoo and Live both ignore the no-follow attribute.

As anywhere else, relevancy to your keywords is essential when commenting is part of your link building strategy and especially for those blogs that allow keywords in comment names.

There are many lists of do-follow blogs out there, I only listed one. The lists are nice but they become outdated after a while since blogs change their comment policies and many of these lists only offer Internet marketing related blogs. So, I listed a couple of good search engines and free softwares that find do-follow blogs by keyword.

Feverish Thoughts - Do-Follow Blogs List - This is one of the longest lists I ever found with a variety of blogs on all subjects.

Do-Follow Diver - Great search engine for finding do-follow blogs.

Do-Follow Search Engine - Newly launched with current results.

Real Link Finder - Free software to find do-follow blogs by keyword subjects.

Fast Blog Finder - Free software to find do-follow blogs by keyword search.

Finding Top Commenter Blogs

Top commenter blogs is where the blogger lists the top commenters in their sidebar or footer, giving them a quality site-wide backlink to their sites.

Top Commenter List - Yan of Thou Shall Blog put together the best list of Top Commenter blogs that is also updated regularly and listed by PR.

Comment Plugins for Wordpress

Here are some of the best comment related plugins for Wordpress.

Akismet Spam - Must Have! Catch and filter spam blog comments, Akismet is highly accurate and will filter out SPAM comments for you to review and delete or post.

WP Threaded Comments - Must have! Puts the reply link under each comment and nests replies below the original comment. Allows for a much neater and tighter comment area. Also, emails the commenter when there is a reply to his/her comment. Lots of customization options in the settings of the plugin.

Edit Comments - Allows commenters to edit their own comments for as long as the default time of 30 minutes (can be edited in settings).

Subscribe to Comments - Provides a check box for readers to subscribe to comments that sends an email notification when a new comment is added to that post.

Cap Comment - Turn off comments when a post has reached the limit you set.

No Follow Free - If you want to make your blog do-follow, this plugin is great!

Keyword Luv - This plugin allows for Name @ KW do-follow comments, where the real name is in the comment but not included in the anchor, good for conversation, and the keyword is anchored with the url, good for SEO. Note: In order to make the anchor do-follow a separate do-follow plugin is required, such as, No Follow Free, in order for the links to be followed.

Comment Luv - Parses the commenters latest blog post and shows it in the comment.

Top Commentator Plugin for Wordpress - Allows you to list top commenters in Blogger blogs and give your most active commenters a nice site wide backlink. Highly customizible.

Top Commentator Plugin for Blogger Blogs - Allows you to list top commenters in Blogger blogs.

Recent Comments - Retrieves most recent comments and places a list in the sidebar widget.

Ajax Comment Preview - Allows commenters to preview their comment exactly as it will look when posted.

WP Gravatar - Allows you to add gravatar’s to comments and put a face with the comment, from a number of services, including Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico. Lots of options and customization with this plugin.

What is your favorite blog commenting tool?

Of all the backlinks you can get the most powerful are within content backlinks, with keyword anchor text on keyword rich related pages, and if they are one-way than that’s the ultimate backlink. Yes, these are stronger than sidebar/blogroll, top commenter and blog comments.

A within content link is basically when another site or blog backlinks to you with your anchor text within written content on one of their inner website pages or blog posts and of course the content needs to be related to your keyword.

Sometimes you can get these backlinks naturally when other blogs and sites link to you, that is great, but often the anchor is off because they guess at it and in reality effective link building is mostly manual and you have to find people who will give you quality backlinks and not lame links pages, or reciprocals as most webmasters want to do.

I am going to refer you to the ultimate resource for these types of backlinks.

Connect Content

1. The members understand how to build links, they know what their doing, and you will get one-way, within content keyword anchor links on keyword related/optimized pages.

2. You can check out the sites that you will link to and that are linking to you and no, you will not get a thousand links at once and set off any alarms!

Basically, you set up your anchor links for other members to choose from and they do the same, no limits! You give links and you get links, period.

All links are validated and tracked by the website so no checking required and you can view them yourself from your dashboard and by going to the site itself.

Everything is done manually by the members, including the choosing, no footprint, no lame codes or automated links whatsoever, it is basically just a place to find like minded site owners who have a common goal (we all know what that is).

Connect Content is only $12 a month, believe me it is the best $12 you will ever spend, the cost is there to keep it a private place and keep the idiots, hater competitors, scammers and spammers out. Right now there are a lot of members, but we need more so that we may all reach our goals.

I am not going to say more than this for obvious reasons, suffice it to say that this is extremely beneficial to all of us bloggers and webmasters and I strongly recommend that you guys go over to Connect Content and sign up, you will not regret it.

Here are more link building resources for search engine optimization and Internet marketing. I have added these to the master list: 65+ Social Bookmarking Sites.

Stumpedia - PR5
Very easy submit, picks up Meta Tags and has a bookmarklet for browsers. A human powered social search engine with 100% do-follow links, add your home pages and all sub-pages, choose categories and tag with relevant keywords.

Social Median - PR5

Easy submit with bookmarklet for browsers. This is one of the best social networks I have ever used. The key is to join news networks that are relevant to your sites, and there are many of them, or you can create your own.

When you submit your content the readers in those networks get emails with content updates. Votes on Socialmedian are called clips and it does not take too many clips to get on the front page. I always get lots of traffic from them and traffic that subscribes and buys, go check it out, there is a lot going on there.

Squidoo - PR8

I have mentioned this before but I will say it again, build some keyword rich lenses related to your sites topics and put some 100% do-follow backlinks on them to your sites. Many of my lenses are PR3+ because they piggy back on Squidoo’s page rank and the backlinks are very valuable.

Make sure to follow the lens building instructions for optimal success at: How-To Squidoo - Steps to Building the Best Lens for Website Promotion.

Wikidot - PR7

Build wiki’s or mini sites on any topic and put in your do-follow backlinks. I have not used this yet, but I hear good things.

Get it Gadget - PR0

Fairly new social site with do-follow links.

Zimbio - PR6

Zimbio will ping and publish your blog posts in relevant wikizines. You can also post articles and add links to your sites. All the links appear to be no-follow, but no-follow links are beneficial and the possibility for exposure and subscribers is there.

Do-Follow Blogs

Do-Follow Blog Search Engine

Newly launched and developed search engine to look for do-follow blogs. Updated regularly with very accurate results.

Happy Link Building!

A reader emailed me and asked for some advice about internal links:

“link titles” - that extra fill-in-the-blank box when entering a link in a post? Is there any value or is it just something nifty for the reader to mouse over?”

First, he is referring to Internal Links that are links back to your own home page and sub pages within your site’s content with the keywords you are targeting and want to rank for in the anchor text. Learn more at: The importance of Internal Link Building for On-Site SEO.

Purpose of Internal Links and
Title Tag vs. Anchor Text

1. Internal links are good for SEO. But, for SEO purposes the title tag is useless, the keyword anchor text is key to relate the page you’re linking to for the keyword you want it to rank for.

2. Improve Bounce Rate. Internal linking improves bounce rate (the rate at which visitors leave your site) and gives readers more stuff to browse on the site thereby keeping them there longer. The Title Tag, which shows up when the reader mouses over the link, is used for this purpose and is crucial to captivate reader interest and get them to read the contents of those links.

So, for example, while the anchor text (the keyword I want that page to rank for) may be Website Traffic, the Title will show more detail about the link, such as “Website Traffic that Converts are You Missing Out?”

Also, it is irritating to read a page and see internal links and not have any clue what is there, it is always good to give your readers a sneak peek.

Title Tag Code

Most softwares, including Wordpress have a fill in box within the add link area for the title and then it will automatically code in HTML, but here is how the code looks:

<a title=”Sneak Peek” href=”http://domain.com/”>Anchor Keyword</a>

Here is how it looks live with the title tag appearing with a mouseover:

No-Follow/Do-Follow Link Attribute

In Wordpress and most website software links created within text are automatically Do-Follow. For Google, when links are Do-Follow you are passing page rank juice to the url in the link and in essence giving it a vote of confidence helping their SEO efforts vs. No-Follow simply means that Google will not follow the link nor assign any rank to it based on your link juice to them.

When to add No-Follow:

For internal links you always want to pass your own internal page rank, also for reciprocal links and other sites that you may want to give a Google strong backlink to.

But, in reality there are several links that you may not want to do-follow and those need to be set manually as no-follow.

Examples for No-Follow:
Affiliate Links (should always be no-follow)
Authority/Reference sites cited to support content
Referral sites provided for readers
…and any other sites that you don’t need to waste PR juice on

Manually Adding No-Follow Link Attribute:

To add the no-follow attribute you need to go to the HTML source of your web page, in Wordpress it is done in the post/page editor by clicking on the HTML tab and manually adding “rel-”nofollow” as shown below:

<a title=”Sneak Peek” href=”http://domain.com/”rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Keyword</a>

Free Headers - Must See!

By the way, I did not want to do a separate post on this, but you have to check out this website I found with free website/blog headers at: Free Web Page Headers. They are simply gorgeous with tons of themes and absolutely free, just right click and save image as and then resize to fit your needs in a graphics software such as Gimp Image Software, which, by the way is also free, quite famous and a complete graphics/photo editing software.

Happy Holidays everyone! I really wish you guys and your families the very best this holiday season and endless success for all your online endeavors.

I really want to thank you all of you for reading my ramblings and all the support and participation on the blog and I look forward to interacting with you more in the coming year!

Internet Marketing - Link Building Affirmations

Never forget that the cornerstone of Internet Marketing is link building. The main way to Page 1 of SERPS (Search Engine Page Results) is via quality backlinks from other sites with relevant keywords in the anchor text.

Manual Link Building vs. Natural Link Building

Manual link building is basically building links via manual efforts, such as with, articles, reciprocal linking, directories, blog comments etc, as opposed to natural links when other’s link to your content and web pages on their own.

It looks like the scrooges have spoken, and manual link building doesn’t work! HA HA!! Meanwhile I am LMAO all the way to page 1 of SERPS!

Lately I am seeing posts in the blogosphere that manual link building is dead, and those links are worthless, and these links don’t work anymore and that it’s a waste of time to build links manually, blah, blah, blah.

Well, I beg to differ, because several of my niche sites sit high in SERPS, a few on page 1 for their keywords and this blog is on page 2 with over 52,000,000 competition primarily from manual link building.

Now, I do get lots of link luv for this blog and that really helps, and I am not saying those natural links aren’t fantastic and wonderful, but what I am saying is that you can rise to page 1 of SERPS with manual link building only and sometimes manual link building is the only and best option for Internet marketing!

The Difference Between Blogs/Flagships and Niche-Affiliate Sites

Often times, a flagship blog like this one will get a good share of natural backlink link luv from the blog community, since there is a lot of interaction with other bloggers and the blog model usually brings about more opportunities for natural link building overall, but in most cases this alone is not enough to rank page 1 anyway.

And, when it comes to affiliate marketing websites, or small niche sites, natural link building can be elusive, unless your Laptop Mag or CNET. So, you are not left with many other options but manual link building, such as with articles, forums, blog comments and directories.

And, yes those links still work!!!

I have several niche sites that are sitting high in SERPS, with all manual link building and not one natural link. And, yes this includes directories, because depending on the directory, those links do still work, contrary to the hype. And, in reality all I really care about is results as they are always the proof of what works and what doesn’t!

Manual Link Building Time Strategy:

40% - Article Marketing
25% - Reciprocal Link Exchange/Blogroll (home page & within content links)
25% - Social Bookmark Links & Forum Sig links & Blog comment links
10% - Directories - 2 Free Directory Submission Softwares

Plus some random links, such as press releases and Squidoo lenses as listed in 13 Ways to Link Building.

In conclusion, just build links everyday! Use your anchor text and get all the links you can get, including some of those no-follows, that Google ignores but Yahoo, MSN and Live still follow and those search engines do bring website traffic as well.

And, don’t worry about the scrooges of Internet Marketing, they are probably just lazy, and while they are waiting for those natural links, and bitching about what doesn’t work, we’ll be building links and laughing our way to page 1!!