I’ve been doing a little thinking lately about trying a little harder to promote some of my sites. The easiest and arguably the best thing you can do when starting to promote a site is to amass as many backlinks as possible.
There are several ways you can go about this like adding the site to directories (which can be cumbersome), buying links (try TextLinkAds), and the easiest is by commenting on blogs that do not use the nofollow attribute.
There are several lists available that contain blogs that use the dofollow plugin or some other way to turn off the nofollow attribute, but one of the coolest uses I’ve seen is Digerati Marketing’s Google custom dofollow search.  Simply head over there, type in the subject of your site (keywords likely) and viola! You have a list of recent posts by sites that dofollow. Go and leave good comments on all of them!
It’s important to leave a good comment that adds to the conversation. If you don’t you risk getting yourself marked as spam or worse, if enough bad comments float in, the blogger might turn nofollow back on. So add to the conversation. It’s a good chance to build a readership for your new site as well by showing that you are able to hold a conversation on the subject.
How do you build links?
Technorati Tags: links, link building, dofollow, nofollow, google custom search
About Shane Ede
The Digerati post is great, thanks for the link! I have also added follow on all my various blogs.
Here is another. Over 600 Blogs. Just click on the signature.
Here is another search engine that searches all dofollow websites. I think these engines are a great way to find relevant blogs that comment on and also to get juicy links.
well.. i tried some searches but most of the blogs have nofollow on their comments….
I think part of the problem, Chris, is that there is a bit of advantage taking of the lists. Unfortunately, it’s almost harder to weed out the link seekers than it is to weed out the spammers.
you can just always use akismet to filter out the spammers.
Thanks so much for the digerati link. I know a lot of people do abuse the system and that there is a lot of danger in not only causing blogger to start using nofollow but also influencing even Google to re-evaluate backlinks (which I would guess they are anyways), but it’s extremely hard for new bloggers to get their content noticed without paying, begging or bothering for back links. Personally, I enjoy commenting if I have something good to say but I usually check to see whether or not the site uses nofollow or not before commenting…just my 2 cents, and again, thanks fo the link.
Its ironic that many bloggers talk about this but then they actually use no follow.
Hopefully, you’re not referring to me Bape. You see, I have a little plugin that is called LinkyLove installed that requires 3-4(I can’t remember what I set it to) comments before you get a follow link. Take a look around and look for some comments by SarahG or TDavid. You’ll see that their comments have follow on them. Please, feel free to comment up a storm as long as they are relevant, and you’ll be the proud recipient of a follow link.
I think the most important part of your post is about leaving good comments that contribute. Dofollow will fail if we don’t all make sure we’re not spamming eachother.
Here is the search engine i created, containes 1000 urls with around 25,000 blog posts, please use with respect.
The problem with do-follow is people will spam. If a blog is good enough then the blog owner won’t need to have do-follow because people will comment to put their point of view accross, not to gain a back link.
The BBC is a perfect example of this. There are no links in the forums and blogs, yet they have many users.
However, when a blog is starting and it wants to get a upper hand, their is no harm in attracting people who want do-follow links, because some will become hooked, so even if you change to no-follow, people will still comment.