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Killing Dofollow Comments Worked!

November 24th, 2009 | Posted in Blogging, Building Blog Traffic | 4 Comments

Last month I wrote that I’m Done With Dofollow Comments, explaining that I believed that this blog was being penalized because so many of the urls in those dofollow comments were pointing to what search engines in general and Google in particular refer to as “bad neighborhoods” and that I was going to disable the plugins that made dofollow comments possible.

A bit of history is in order.  Back in the fall of ’07, just before the infamous “Google slap”, this blog enjoyed a PR 3 ranking and I fully expected it to eventually reach a PR 4.  Then Google updated their algorithms and blogs by the thousands lost page rank. First they’d slip a point or two, then after the next update they’d fall to zero.

That’s what happened here.  Over the course of three months this blog lost a point of PR every month until by Dec ’07 it was sitting at PR zero.  That’s where it stayed all this time in spite of all my efforts to build inbound links and promote the site. I even looked into so-called services that have a habit of guaranteeing results like it was some kind of private placement memorandum.  I looked into all kinds of ways to get links and ended up just doing things myself, the hard way, because those “services” are not for the “financially challenged”.

Then last month I removed plugins that made the urls in comments dofollow (i.e. would pass page rank).  After I did that I went about business as usual.  Then only today I noticed.  The PR for this site was NO LONGER ZERO!  The base url, http://blog.peculiarplace.com now ranks higher than PR 0 for the first time in two effing years.  Granted, It’s only a PR 1, but it’s the first move in the right direction in years.  I’ve also noticed a definite trend of increased traffic levels over the last several weeks.

Can it be just coincidence that it happened within thirty days of removing dofollow?  I don’t believe so.  I think the return of page rank and the increase in traffic from search engines is directly related to allowing comment urls to go back to their default rel=”nofollow” status.

As a result of this, I’ll be removing those dofollow plugins from all of my blogs within the next few days.

[tags]link spam, no more dofollow, comment spam, comment policy change, bad neighborhood[/tags]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 15:22 and is filed under Blogging, Building Blog Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Killing Dofollow Comments Worked!”


  1. I can understand the frustration when you have to manually weed out the junk comments. This increases the overhead, precious time is spent tackling spammers rather than on marketing the blog.


  2. not only that, but it’s just a plain old pain in the ass


  3. I believe it is a necessary action on quality blogs. You may have lost commentators but it’s still better than losing the whole webpage.


  4. Yep, dealing with the spam comments I becoming a really tedious work for the administrators of blogs. All these spambots are making me and my friends really mad.