Ana, you’re asking questions I’ve been mulling over …

Comment posted on DoFollow Express: Is Traffic Generation Cafe Getting Off? by Kimberly Castleberry

Ana, you’re asking questions I’ve been mulling over in my head for a while now as I have a blog at alexa 36k that requires the same thing be asked.

My blog is fully dofollow, including the commentluv link (something plugins like lucy’s linky love don’t properly do on most blogs), keywordluv, commentluv and twitterlink comments.

Let me apologize in advance if this sounds abrupt, I’m fighting a migraine and this issue has been a hot topic for me so I had to jump in regardless…

At the end of the day… our blogs are our homes… and the visitors our guests. How welcome we make those guests is certainly up to us.

However, in my gut I feel, there is something intrinsically *rude* in building a weekly house party inviting all of our friends over and giving them free reign to use the pool, showers, pool table, and eat the chips… and then later after their very presence has built our blog (party) to where it stands, telling them they may no longer do those things… as though we are now too good to share our toys when our ranking came on their shoulders in the first place. Sure we can ask them to clean up after themselves (parties are messy and bigger parties are more messy) and leave better comments… we can ask them to chip into the cost of the party (bigger parties are more expensive) and help us out by clicking aff links, donation buttons, and syndication/share buttons to enable us to get enough traffic to offset the “expense” of our toys… but darnit we gotta be really darn careful that it isn’t our FRIENDS whos fingers we catch in the door when slam it and take our toys away, least we become another that became too good to hang out with the locals and forgot where we came from.

The day we forget those that gave us our rank - is they day we’re “just another problogger” and not a friend.

Regarding SEO Super Comments, its a great plugin and I used it extensively. I however turned it off when I discovered that something in my robots.txt file was causing the /cid links to get no-index status … wow, talk about stealthy link killing. Once I have time to assess the issue with my robots.txt then that plugin is certainly going back in place. (In fact I run several of Prelovac’s plugins and enjoy them) You appear to have the same bug. When I open all of these cid links and then open SEO Doctor (also by Prelovac), I see that the page is noindex. Meaning the comments are being dropped into the ether as far as Google is concerned. Screenshot: http://ow.ly/i/6BAo/original (actually you appear to have this occurring within your comment page structure, so it appears that /comment-page-1/ is a non indexed. Something to look into.

* Do you think blog commenting is a tid-for-tad kind of arrangement?

Yes, and no. Tit-for-tat exists regardless of the do-follow status, IMHO. Sometimes the give is in superbly moving content that helps the reader enough they feel inspired to comment. Sometimes its a piece that doesn’t inspire them yet the seo assistance is enough to draw them to comment.

Is there a lot of sense of entitlement run rampant… yes. Is that exactly a bad thing, not really as long as the commenter is leaving a quality comment that builds on the original post and/or making use of those social media syndication buttons to help us out.

How deep does this tit-for-tat run? So deeply that some of my favorite blogs out there are not only DF/CL/KL/TLC enabled but also “I comment back” blogs meaning when I comment there, they almost always return with a comment on my blog. I honestly wish I could find enough hours in the day to maintain that pace although I do try to make sure I visit my regulars. It builds an incredible sense of connected community.

* Do you expect a quality link when you comment on other blogs, and specifically on my blog?

* Would you still comment if my blog was completely NoFollow?

I had not known prior that your blog was DoFollow, but having just learned this you’ve been added to my short list of DoFollow blogs to keep an eye on. This means the likelihood of me commenting is a lot higher than if you were not there both because I monitor those blogs for stuff I can comment on and because it benefits me more. Without Dofollow you have to not only write content that moves me but have enough of a call to engagement that I overcome the standard desire to be a lazy reader.

Would I comment if you were nofollow - if the piece struck me, sure, but the frequency drops due to less SEO gains.

* Why do you comment on my blog to begin with?

Today I’ve commented because this is a discussion that needs had within the community as more and more of these dofollow blogs take off like wildfire.

Reading the thread here, I see that odds are I’m going to sound like a jerk when I say that I read blogs for two reasons… which produces different behavior.

1. Recreation & Education: I surf to surf some days and other day because I need a piece of information. These are honestly not days I comment a lot. I tend to read, absorb, thing and enjoy and not bother with comments. Lazy? Yup like many people. I do usually hit the tweet button though when I find good stuff because its fast but still helps.

2. LinkBuilding & Community Building: Commenting on others blogs serves me in two ways … SEO value and community building value particularly when coupled with a Tribe Syndication Alliance team. (A rather extreme version of pre-arranged tit for tat, if you like, more so than even just a Blog Alliance which is its older sibling and relates more to commenting only).

Blog commenting is one of my methods of traffic generation and given the high value of links from Dofollow blogs you can bet your buttons that I will go the extra effort to figure out how to write something useful on all but the worst posts on a Dofollow/Keywordluv/Commentluv/TLC blog…. whereas if I have to strain my braincells many days a nofollow blog is just not worth the effort and time it takes.

If I have an hour to get in some blog commenting, and we can generalize and say that Dofollow links are worth 10x what nofollow links are, then my time is best spent bookmarking and visiting Dofollow blogs particularly those that are approximately in my niche.

Sure, I sometimes take the time to comment on a nofollow blog if the content was good or the blogger sounded like they had a real need for feedback (sounded stuck/troubled/etc) or if they are a new blogger I’ve not yet had time to assist in getting to dofollow status and sometimes just because I’m bored, or if they are on my TSA team for the week (Different than if they’re on my other tribe teams where it is easier to give them an education on dofollow) but these really are exceptions for me as commenting is part of a larger strategy for me and I try to maximize my time investment.

Case in point is that I almost never comment on many of the big problogger classed blogs because they tend to be in the education/recreation class for me, although sometimes I will just to get a link if I can get in before comments are a million miles deep.

For me, part of staying dofollow was recently putting a pretty detailed but blunt commenting policy in place that lets me feel less guilty about being down right aggressive in spam management.

When I think about what it is that drives me to want to back out of Dofollow… its fear and nothing more. I see no benchmark that says I’m hurting and my metrics are moving backwards. Everything still points to forward momentum. Sure maybe not as fast as it could be if I went to NoFollow but that question comes down to how greedy am I to shut the doors on friends fingers after having skyrocketed out of nowhere. I have not had trouble ranking for keyword combinations I’ve worked on, I’ve not had trouble getting listed in organic search, my alexa is still dropping albiet slower now as I get higher, my name recognition is way up, my income is up, and I’m still able to help my friends and fans at the same time. My gut tells me to ask for more than that is greedy.

If a blogger wants to reduce the odds I’ll comment, all they need to do is stay nofollow… want to further reduce it, skip commentluv… want to DESTROY it… use Disqus or another system that forces me to waste time logging in and most of those systems also eat my links.

So … um… yeah… after writing a novel for you I guess its safe to say I’m pretty passionate about the whole darn topic and have really had to do some soul searching myself to keep my head together as my traffic has increased. I’ll probably have this same argument with myself all the way to the top but I hope someone gives me a kick in the pants if I short change my foundation readers.

I can’t switch to many of the “x comments for dofollow” because they tend to not be coded correctly to handle the commentluv link. I was using them before I went full dofollow and have never looked back.

The one thing I HAVE seriously looked at was a “dofollow whitelist” that would have to be hardcoded (someone has the code on their site for use) as no plugin exists for it currently, that would let us whitelist our “regulars” by hand and protect them from nofollow. Of course this is tedious, time consuming, annoying, and likely to fail to match the “term” the minute they change keywords on us. Also as with the plugin, the code I found did not look like it would handle the additional comment link that commentluv creates.

I’m interested to see where you go with this Ana. I fully understand the weight of what is on your shoulders to keep the blog moving forward. I know that the choices are not easy. I hope that if you decide to retreat to nofollow that you adequately document your existing avg comments per month, average increase in comments per month and comments per post and then track them for several months after the change allowing for time for your blog to be removed from various individuals list of dofollow blogs. You give some great value here and I have no doubt that you”ll continue to thrive no matter which way you go. As I tell my readers on my blog, sometimes I do things that I would not advise them to do, because I can afford the penalty if the test backfires. You’re in that situation, you have the slack in the rope to see whether the relationships you’ve built over time and the SEO work you’ve got in place is strong enough to carry you when the DoFollow step-stool is removed. You’ve certainly got some hard decisions on your plate girlfriend and I don’t envy em.

With Love,
Kimberly

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