Most bloggers will tell you that getting noticed on the web is not an easy task. It can be confusing and frustrating a task. One of the best things that you can do to improve your search engine visibility and page rank is to have quality links off site that come back to you. There are a number of ways to accomplish this but one of the easiest ways is to leave comments on other blogs. Blogs or websites that are related to your own blog's niche and that have a higher page rank than your own are the most desireable. But you have to be sure that these sites are not using the nofollow tag on their commentor's website links.

Follow up:

Linking to dofollow blogs that have a higher page rank than your own is definately a great way to help improve your own page rank and search engine standings. This practice is known as link building. If you can get one or more links on these types of blogs then the search engines can track back to your site and you get an SEO boost yourself. But before you can do that you have to know: What is a dofollow blog versus a nofollow blog? How do you find these little gems on the big wide web? And how do you check to see if they have a higher page rank than you?

It's not difficult. Let me help you understand it all and tell you where to get the tools to make it easy...

First let me explain the nofollow tag. This tag, when added to a link on a website or blog, signals the search engines to not follow the link back to it's origins. This tag was implemented some time ago to help discourage comment spam and at the time it seemed like a good idea, but it wasn't all that good at it. We now have options such as Akismet and Captcha to help control spam, and these tools have proved to be very effective. Sadly blog platforms have not really kept up with these innovations and many blogs have the nofollow tag as a default setting.

Your challenge then, is to find blogs or sites that allow comments and ones that don't use the nofollow tag. These blogs are referred to as dofollow sites and are highly desirable to commentors. Finding them can be a challenge. If you are a smart blogger, you read your competitor's blogs on a regular basis. These are prime places for you to leave comments, because of your shared niche. Not only will you get more traffic from the search engines, but you will also have the potential to attract your competition's readers to your own site.

So how do you know if you are commenting on a dofollow site? First of all, are you using the Firefox browser? I would highly recommend that you do, you can download it here. Then I suggest that you download and install the NoDoFollow plugin for Firefox. When it is installed you can right click, select the plugin and it will highlight all the links on a page. Nofollow links will be highlighted in red, while the dofollow links are highlighted with blue. If you see that the website links of commentors on the blog are blue and not red, you can be confident that your links will be followed.

Once you have the Firefox browser and the NoDoFollow plugin installed, you should also install the SEOpen plugin that lets you check page rank of any site you are on. You want to leave comments on blogs with a higher page rank than your own - this will help the search engines, especially Google, to assign more value to your blog by association.

And finally - How do you find dofollow sites? Blindly stumbling around the web hoping to happen upon them is time consuming and frustrating. There must be better ways? You're right, there are. Below are a couple of ways to find these blogs.

If you are one of the many who read my article about SEO PowerSuite, then downloaded the tools, you can use the Link-Assistant software to help find and manage good linking partners. You can even watch a great instructional video from Link-Assistant.com to help you learn to use this powerful link building software.

If you'd rather not download and install the software, you can also use the DoFollow Blogs Search Engine at WMTIPS.com. Unlike other dofollow search engines it does not rely on lists of dofollow blogs that may be out of date. Instead it uses live queries against the current Google index. All you do is input keywords that relate to the topic of the kind of blogs you want to comment on and it finds them for you.

Finally, if your blog is a dofollow blog, put yourself out there where other people can find you. You know you should submit your site to blog and RSS directories, but have you ever submitted to a dofollow blog directory? You should do that now, providing that you don't have the nofollow tag on your commentors websites. You can use this list to find dofollow directories and search engines, it's from LinkBuildr.com.

You can also post a dofollow banner on your site to help others recoginze that you are a dofollow blog. You can find some great free banner options on Randa Clay's site and you should also read the accompanying article on dofollow blogs. It contains great information on how to make sure your blog is set as a do follow blog too. That can help get you more comments on your own blog as well, it's a win-win situation.

Hope this demystifies the dofollow versus nofollow dilema for you. Make the most of what you've learned and get your blog noticed.

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