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.

With sites like Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and etc… What makes people think that hosting their own blogs are necessary? Features are constantly being upped on sites like blogger, which definitely draws people into using it, but does it stop experienced webmasters from hosting their own blogs? After years of experienced making, optimizing, and marketing websites, the pros and cons of a non self-hosted blog become quite clear. Social media is the biggest factor when determining if your site should be self hosted, or not.

Pros

• Many people simply choose a blog service like blogger because it doesn’t cost any money. Since other blog services like typepad do cost money but have generally the same pros and cons, we’ll leave this positive attribute as just a sort of bonus.
• You can get as much traffic as you want, use as much bandwidth as you must, and your site shouldn’t ever go down. Since your site has no bandwidth limits, you’re free to make the front page of digg, where you might have crashed your site if you were hosting it yourself.
• Uptime is maximized. With a blog you don’t host yourself, your uptime will probably be much higher than if you bought hosting from some whacked out, 3rd world host you thought would be good.
• There are plenty of features, and ways to easily integrate advertisements into your blogger blogs.
• Your pr will go up significantly faster, with significantly less work, just because your domain is a subdomain of a popular website. Which means it’s possible for your work to rank higher on Search Engine Rankings than self-hosted content.

Cons

• Your site is less valuable to advertisers that are looking for pr. Less people want links on blogger sites because they see them as unprofessional compared to blog’s that you host on your own. Also, since your site is running off of a subdomain, the link has less value anyways.
• When you don’t host the blog yourself, you have less customizability of its features. While blog hosts are doing their best to make this statement untrue, it will be some time before you’ll be able to do everything a self-hosted blog can do.
• Your site has less credibility just because you didn’t pay for your hosting. Sorry, but it’s true, I think of sites that are made for free to be almost on par with Barney.

All though it may seem like the pros far out weigh the cons, that’s not really true. All though there is more bullet points under Pros, the importance of the Cons should not be taken lightly. The credibility of your website is of the utmost importance when it comes to the ??????? – PROFIT! factor.

In conclusion, if you’ve got the money to spend on a decent webhost (bluehost), then just do it.