Hello again, my social networking friend!

Lately there has been much ado about Dofollow, and Nofollow links.  Links are Dofollow by default, but can be made into Nofollow links by adding just a bit of html code.  On the other hand, links in wordpress blog comments are automatically set to nofollow.  Many people believe that making their links Dofollow is a big enough incentive to attract many visitors to their website.  Dofollow blogs do infact attract more commenters, because they want links back to their site, but is it really worth it?

Too many Dofollow links can actually have a negative effect on your webpage’s pr.  I’ve had first hand experience in realizing that.  Back on my old webmaster blog I’d had a list of forums that allowed signature links, but I’d foolishly linked to every one of them!  Since the list was Dofollow lots of people wanted to be on the list, hence more traffic to my website, but there was a downside as well.  My website went down in pagerank, and I got less visitors from search engines.  After I learned the cause I removed the links, and my page rank went back up soon after.

The moral of the story is; having to many links on a webpage has a negative influence on your pagerank.

The Solution: The solution is actually quite simple, let me list a few ways to avoid loss of pr.

• Don’t use the Dofollow plugin which makes your comment links Dofollow.  It may seem like a good idea, but if you get a lot of comments then you’re actually hurting your blog.  Simply leave it as is.
• Try not to use too many links in your posts, only throw in a few when you need to, or you really want to.
• If you need to make a list of links, or you want to as an incentive for your readers, than you can download the plugin “Nofollow Links in Posts“.  This allows you to choose whether each link is Dofollow, or Nofollow.
• Don’t think too much about it, when you’re linking to someone who you’ve learned from, or something you want your readers to see, try not to be stingy about using Dofollow or Nofollow.