Having spent so much time over the last 6 months evangelising the adoption of dofollow plugins and solutions to remove nofollow from comments, the last week has been filled with highs and lows.
The No Nofollow Highs
Last week the No Nofollow | I Follow | Dofollow community on Bumpzee crossed the 100 member mark, and 100 blog mark. This week we are already up to 137 members and 132 blogs. What is more encouraging is that I see a lot of members actually using Bumpzee for browsing blogs.
Some interesting points:-
- 2nd Highest Number of blogs – the blogs were individually submitted to the community
- 4th Highest Number of Members – we could well overtake Jim’s How to be successful community in a couple of weeks.
- Many of the communities already overtaken have been established much longer
There are hundreds, even thousands of blogs I could add to the community, but I would really prefer people make the decision themselves.
Every blog included is vetted. I pick up lots of blogs that don’t have nofollow removed correctly, blogs made from affiliate datafeeds, blogs that are mainly resyndicated content, and even blogs with totally broken comment systems.
There are no requirement to use the Bumpzee widget to be listed, or the voting button, although blogs that do include the voting button do gain more traffic if their readers are Bumpzee aware.
If a blog doesn’t have a visibly active community, leaving comments on a regular basis, I am going to go snooping around and your chances of being included are reduced.
The community didn’t benefit from being the first on Bumpzee, such as the Affiliate Marketing community, and the first managed blogs such as the SEO/SEM, How To Be Successful, and Next Gen Marketing, the later communities I might add also had a few non-member blogs added.
The Lows – Dofollow Abuse
I suppose if you model yourself as the internet equivalent of Ghengis Kahn then the idea of charging people to have nofollow removed from their comments would be attractive, but I have noticed that many of John Chow’s readership (the grown up ones with money) don’t appreciate it.
If I was an advertiser buying reviews on Johns Blog, I would worry about how the quality of readership is deteriorating as his readership supposedly increases, though I am sure his readership will appreciate the male enhancement text ads.
Some of my readers have already been writing about this
Chris thinks this is a bit of a perversion of the Dofollow movement and goes on to say:-
Personally, there isn’t a blog on the planet that I would pay to have a followable comment link on, nor would I ever charge for one. Followable comment links are a nice thing to give away, but I just don’t feel there is any benefit at all to buying one. Well, apart from to Johns bank balance of course.
Webstractions gives lots of reasons why you shouldn’t pay for the links, and why you shouldn’t use the plugin John is selling on your own blog.
RT has actually already written twice about it, first of all in one of his drivebys where he said:-
After reading the news about it at Blog-Op and then reading the source article myself at John Chow dot Com, I’ve decided that John’s money-grabbing link whoring has turned me off for the last time. So much so that I’m removing his links from anything I have, including my feed reader. See ya later, John!
He later went into even more depth about John Chow:-
I may not have the best blog in the world (far from it) but I refuse to have it even remotely associated with bloggers that use or abuse their readers in any way, shape or form. Sure, their blogs are their blogs and they have the right to use them anyway they want. I’m sure it won’t bother them to lose just little old me as a reader, but if more people know and more people follow suit, I’m sure it’ll bother them a whole lot more.
The Paper Bull had equally strong words about John Chow
He can call it whatever he wants – but selling a $10 monthly membership to turn off the no-follow tag on comments is about as distasteful a scheme as I’ve seen in a while. Blogs are built upon conversation and are wholly dependent upon comments left by readers who valued the article enough to spend a few moments to tap out a response. Using comments as a means to extract coin is disgusting.
Reputation Management Lesson
Alienating your most valuable readers to gain more 13-year-old kids isn’t good practice.
Tip of the Nofollow / Dofollow Iceburg
Over the last 2 months the number of references to Dofollow shown in Google has increased by 50,000, and over the last 6 months it has more than doubled.
Whilst that is significant, I would love these isolated blogs to become part of the no nofollow community on Bumpzee where they can share their link love, and interact with blogs talking about similar subjects.
Only you can make it happen
