In many ways he is right:-

• You get increased automated comment spam
• You get increased spam from outsourced commenting
• You get increased spam from people using commenting efficiency tools (Comment Kahuna, Comment Hut etc)
• You get increased spam from people using dofollow search engines
• You get increased spam from people using lists of dofollow blogs
• You get Internet Marketing Gurus encouraging their interns to comment on their behalf

It takes additional time to manage comments on your blog even when you set up Spam Karma effectively, but that is something you could outsource to compensate, or have managed by a more junior member of staff.

You also leak a little bit of extra juice, how much depends on your site structure, and how many comments you get. Some people prefer to have huge blogrolls of the people who buy them drinks at seminars.

What Do You Gain?

I think the biggest gain is in community

• I don’t have to write all the content myself, my readers contribute and gain a small reward
• What happens when you engage a community of linkerati? They link to you more often
• If you gain more links, you are just sharing part of a bigger pie
• The tools are keyword based – people with websites covering a specific topic visit your site – maybe initially to just drop links, but it is amazing how many can be converted to regular visitors who leave constructive comments, and link to you from their own sites.

Google doesn’t give penalties just because you decide to let those providing user generated content have a little link love.

I should know, my blog due to paid reviews has been on Google’s radar for a long time – I was one of the first to be hit with a PageRank penalty back in October 2007, and as soon as I blocked those review pages with robots.txt, my Google pagerank penalty was at least partially lifted, and I think in a more recent update they lifted it totally.

It does take a little effort, but if you haven’t got time to

• Read the comments left by your visitors
• Check out their sites
• Give them feedback
• Communicate

Why the hell have you got a blog in the first place?

I would be much more worried about comments on your blog which have been left with commercial intent with the upcoming changes to the consumer protection act on 26th May

Update

Whilst this isn’t in any way conclusive proof, it is just a little fun to add this

I have topical authority on my side to compensate for the fact I linked to Dave who posted first, though Google probably can’t factor those into its ranking that quickly.

Thus this result might just be domain authority… it doesn’t look like I have some kind of authority problem, despite having 1000s of dofollow links from comments.

Update

Dave has inched ahead of me in the SERPs – I think the link Jane gave him from SEOmoz swayed the standing fairly heavily.

It runs something like this (though I haven’t signed up to one to get exact details)

• You sign up to the mentorship program
• One of the tasks is backlink building from Dofollow blogs
• The new internet marketer runs around leaving comments on Dofollow blogs, but uses backlinks to the blog or salespage of the internet marketing guru
• After dropping a certain number of backlinks, the new internet marketer qualifies for a bonus

The backlinks are sometimes the link reserved for the comment author, or sometimes product mentions within the comments.

I Regard This As Comment Spam

My normal reaction is to hit the spam button, which will eventually prevent me seeing future comments by the people on the mentorship program, even if they eventually start leaving comments on their own behalf.

I haven’t got time to edit links even if the comments contain some legitimate content.

The mentorship program is effectively burning legitimate link sources for the people taking the “course”.

Great job..

In addition, the chances of me giving an editorial link at some time to the “guru” or promoting one of their products as a JV partner are hugely reduced.

Legitimate Employees And VAs

As a blogger, I want to know who is leaving a comment.

I don’t mind anchor text used in comments, if my blog passes juice it might as well pass anchor text as well, but anyone following the link needs to be able to determine who left the comment.
This is a lot easier with personal blogs, or blogs run by a single person.

If my friend Michel Fortin left a comment with the anchor text “Copywriting” I am not going to worry about it. You go to his blog, it is clearly his blog.

Joy Gustilo works for Russell Brunson – that is a link to her profile on DotComSecrets and Joy often uses “Internet Marketing Joy” as anchor text – that is great, I know it is Joy and not Russell leaving the comment.

I have a few other readers also competing for that SERP so I should probably balance that out a little

If Courtney used “Internet Marketing” when leaving a comment, I wouldn’t have a problem – his blog is personal

You have probably seen Dwain Jeworski on various social networks. He used to work with Rich Schefren, and now is with the Internet Marketing Center as their Affiliate Manager. If Dwain used “Internet Marketing Dwain as anchor text in a comment, that would be appropriate. Just using Internet Marketing wouldn’t, because it would be impossible to tell if the comment was written by Dwain or maybe Derek Gehl.
The IMC have over 100 employees – can you imagine if a few of them all had a conversation in my comment area each signing their name as Internet Marketing?

One thing I would love to see on the IMC site is staff profiles which could be used as landing pages for social media link building. It would be possible to funnel juice from those landing pages through to pages where it is needed, which is much harder to do with links directly to a home page.

That is something Joy should think about with her comment links as well.

I am not quite sure how I would deal with comments from Jim Boykin if he was using anchor text such as “Internet Marketing” – I think anchor text would be appropriate for a link to his blog, as the blog is clearly his, whereas a link to the company site I would want some kind of identifier in the anchor text as to who left the comment.
Then again Jim’s ninja’s would probably use some kind of landing page method.

Of course Josh could link through to his Internet Marketing Blog as much as he likes. Again it is his personal blog. (some more on Josh’s blog coming up soon)

So ends my “SERPs Neutral” overview of acceptable linking practice, though there is a good chance I have missed a few people out from my readers.

I am Not Going To Name & Shame

At least not yet…

I left a comment on one blog regarding this practice, and it seemed to stop, at least on my blog, but the comment didn’t appear on the blog, and was not acknowledged directly.

Another “guru” when contacted about this last year offered to chat about it, but didn’t apologise.

I have noticed it starting again over the last few weeks, not just spammy linkbuilders, but quite obviously new internet marketers under some kind of mentorship.

Come on guys, behave… I’m serious

On Shoemoney, Pam takes a pop at the Ifollow Movement, the lists of links to dofollow blogs that traversed the Blogosphere 6 months ago.
Whilst I was included on some of those lists, I didn’t take an active roll, as the lists really didn’t present any value to me.

I suppose Akismet is great if you don’t care about the comments on your blog, or whether the good ones appear.

Comment moderation with Spam Karma can take time if you get a lot of comments but not much more than the time it takes to read them, and if you are using subscribe to comments, you are much less likely to be hit with a CAN SPAM complaint – I see some fairly nasty comment spam come through to my mailbox all the time from Akismet protected blogs.

I applaud Greg Boser’s efforts to create a hand picked selection of Dofollow blogs around a specific niche, though he will find many of the blogs in the Dofollow community on Bumpzee are high quality, but not all to do with online marketing (thank goodness)
There will be an OPML file available for the community very soon, I just need some time to do some testing and to give Scott some feedback.

Dofollow & Community Go Hand In Hand

If you want to be a successful blogger like Liz, note we are not talking about a successful affiliate who just happens to have a large fan base, but only earns 3% of income from blogging such as Shoemoney, then the comments you receive on your blog are as much, or even more important than the original article.

Lots depends on your business model as to whether creating a professional, positive business culture in your comment area is important to you.

As Kirk points out with some amazing comment stats Liz has been very successful in building up a community over 2 years. 50,000 real comments.

In a year I have only had just over 5000 comments, and many remark that I get a lot of comments.

Part of it Kirk attributes to subscribe to comments, it is important – I remarked a while ago to Darren at Problogger that one change he could make to his blog was to reintroduce subscribe to comments, as I would certainly participate more.

By doing so, I feel more a part of his community, I comment more frequently because I can follow the conversation that take place afterwards in response, and also link to Darren more.
It would be interesting to see if he can attribute an increase in return visitors due to subscribe to comments. Maybe there is a way with some hacking to measure that.

I would estimate that less than 2% of the comments I receive on a daily basis are people commenting purely for a search engine boost, and whilst I am a human so I can make a mistake, I would estimate that 90% of those comments don’t appear on the blog even if they sound vaguely on topic. Of the ones that do get on the blog, most have the link removed.

The same is true of deliberately self promotional comments of little value.

The best way to tell my readers you wrote about a subject, is to link to me with a trackback – I have seen up to 50 people leaving my site in the past following an early trackback with a good headline

I don’t mind good quality timely link drops. As an example Court mentioned the “real” PageRank update to me in a comment with a link to his post.

PageRank & Real Attribution

For me, attribution isn’t an after thought of a careless thanks or token gesture, I always try to give people links that will send as much traffic as possible, or be of most value to them (useful keywords).
I suppose you could look on it as the whitehat way of “selling links”

As an example, here is the link I thanked Courtney with:-

When people base their article around information obtained by others, the least they can do is try to send some traffic to the other party, otherwise the link isn’t much better than a paid link.

Sure it might fulfil legal obligations, and possibly let the search engines know the source of the content, but is that really sufficient?

Over the last few months I have rejected over 100 blogs to the No Nofollow / Dofollow community on Bumpzee, and all but about 20 were because they didn’t have nofollow removed correctly from their comments.

Fortunately about 30 of those subsequently either contacted me to have this explained to them, or fixed the problem and then notified me that things were resolved.

Lots of people for some reason don’t get back in touch with me.

Requirements To Join The No Nofollow Community On Bumpzee

These are the requirement on the submission form

This community is for family friendly sites that support the Do Follow, I Follow, No Nofollow movement.
Blogs can be on any subject, but please do not submit blogs with NSFW content.

Please ensure all blogs contain original content, and have comments visible that clearly demonstrate that nofollow has been removed.

Of the 20 sites rejected for quality reasons a few were splogs, one was effectively a single page sales letter, and a fair number were datafeed sites or didn’t have enough original content.

I have also had a couple where their comment system was totally broken

Rejection Message

When people are rejected, they receive the following message

Your blog cannot be included in the community.

Most sites are rejected because they haven’t implemented some form of dofollow correctly, and sites are checked before inclusion.
It is not possible to resubmit after changes have been made to fix a problem.
If you are rejected, fix the “no nofollow” requirement, and then send a personal message to the community administrator for inclusion.

Thank you for your submission.

Some people probably had removed nofollow, but then performed an upgrade to their blogging software and forgot to enable a plugin, or maybe changed theme and forgot to make corrections.

YADL (Yet Another Dofollow List)

There seems to be another Dofollow list making the rounds.

Out of curiosity I visited the blogs linking through, and every single one I checked was on blogspot, and didn’t have nofollow removed correctly.

How To See Nofollow Links At a Glance

If you are using Firefox as your browser, just install the search status plugin which shows nofollow links using CSS highlighted with a pink background.

Policing the Neighbourhood

I do visit blogs in the No Nofollow community, in fact I am sure like many members of the community I spend more time on dofollow blogs than any other.

I am actually trying to find the time to do an audit, to ensure that all members continue to comply although it would be appreciated if people performed a self-audit occasionally, because it is easy to forget to switch a plugin back on, or forget to modify a theme after a change.

This is something in your own interests, after all if you display a badge in your sidebar, and it is no longer true, you are deceiving your audience.

Lucia has spent a lot of time not just programming, but profiling the traits of comment spam and I am sure that work will continue.

Take a look at Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin

Now added to the master list of Nofollow and Dofollow solutions

There are all kinds of blogs in the blogosphere, and some of the logos created and used by supporters of the “cause” are a little on the tame side.

I will be adding the logos to the display in the no nofollow community soon.

You can grab an eye-catching logo design from Chuck.

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

I Am Not As Productive As I Want To Be

This is painfully true, in some ways I am like a tumbleweed blown about by wind in multiple directions, and by what is typical in this day and age on the internet, information overload.
This can be especially worrying when your main source of income is from your internet activities, and you have bills to pay, and have to keep food on the table.

Defining Purpose

Unlike a tumbleweed, I always have an overall strategic goal I wish to reach. Whilst some aspects of this blog evolve over time, in reference to the content, I have defined a specific audience I wish to reach and various topics I wish to discuss, and maybe influence.
Alister Cameron heavily quoted Robert Allen, expressing the difference between goal setting, and having passion and purpose for what you do.

I might lack on the goal setting on a daily basis but I have a passion for what I do, and an overall driving purpose to my endeavours.

Any amount of daily goals you set will rarely outweigh the value in working on something you are passionate about. Reaching daily goals has the effect of a small bomb blast in a quarry, whereas passion is like the act of the sea on a cliff, or the way the rain can erode a mountain.

Criticizing Goals & Passion

Amit Agarwal has been criticising Technorati Favorite exchanges. Hundreds of people set a collective goal and are pursuing it with a passion. That isn’t a small bomb blast, it is a surge of the masses, and A-list bloggers had better get used to it.
He is factually incorrect in his statements, because exchanging Technorati favorites doesn’t affect Google Juice in any way.
If popular bloggers get displaced from the “top favorites list” by people actually utilizing the tools that Technorati spent a lot of time developing, then that is the correct thing to happen.

If Amit was actually using Technorati Favorites for any specific purpose, maybe his arguements would carry some weight, but whilst he encourages people to add him to their favorites, he has only added 8 favorites of his own.

I was exchanging Technorati favorites with my readers for almost 6 months before this “Technorati Exchange Train” gathered steam. Most of the blogs I favorited were being favorited for the very first time, or possibly the second time if they had already favorited themselves.

The Technorati meme is more Z-list than 2000 bloggers, and certainly any links I have created to people taking part have been deliberately one directional without a requirement to link back to me, and every single link was highly relevant.

Also, it is not like any of these ideas about exchanging Technorati Favorites are new. Whilst I was first doing it back in November of last year, SEOmoz was 2 months ahead of me.

Responding to Your Readers Needs

Most A-Listers only respond to their readers when a reader links to them, and pays them lots of compliments.
Even though I disagree with Jason Calacanis on many things, one thing I do respect him for is having the balls to admit how he chooses who he links to. It would be going to far to give me any credit for why he now has some disclosure on his sidebar, but most likely he will at least read this. Vanity Google Alerts are great ;)

But how do you respond to your readers needs when they don’t link to you?

I am just small fry, less than 1000 targeted subscribers, but already my feed reader, at least for me, has outgrown it’s usefulness.
When I only had 100 subscribers, I actually had most of my readers in my Feed Reader, and read every single post they made, plus a load of other feeds, including lots of A-Listers.

Through using various blogging social network tools, such as MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and BlogCatalog I grew my readership. It was important to have content that related to my reader’s needs, so my Feed Reader continued to groan.

Feed Readers Are Not Productive

Unless you restrict your reading habits to a really small segment of the blogging population, or you are a blogging machine like Robert Scoble, a feed reader is only going to give you a small window of what is happening in the blogosphere.

One option is to leverage people like Robert Scoble who share content with Google Reader, but shared content with Google Reader also has it’s pitfalls.

Another alternative is to use meme trackers such as Techmeme or Megite.

The problem is that Techmeme is really only about the top ranking Tech blogs, although they do have sister sites for things like celebrities and politics, and even Megite only has a certain width to their standard coverage.

Custom Meme Trackers

For me the best alternative to information overload are various custom solutions that will allow me to maximise the width of my reading, whilst still being able to focus in a specific topics of interest.

I had hoped that I would be able to do something with MyBlogLog, and I hopefully will in the future, allowing me to not only browse the blogs of my readers, but also the blogs that they find most interesting.

Whilst I am writing this post, I am importing over 800 feeds into Blogrovr that I exported from my Technorati Favorites. Some of those will no doubt be duplicates from what I exported from Google Reader. It is actually causing a few technical problems, but I will be writing about that soon.

I do need to clean my OPML from my Technorati favorites a little, but for me it is actually quite a targeted list of blogs who are either my own readers, or the people who read my reader’s blogs, and are interested in blog promotion.

If you explore Technorati, there are lots of powerful things you can do with favorites. Import OPML, search your favorites, tag your favorites, grab a widget to display your favorites, or if you prefer, an RSS feed of your favorite’s most recent posts.
You can also export your OPML to use with other services. You can even grab an OPML file for a specific tag.
Whilst I recently discussed some of the things that Google Blog Search does better than Technorati, I think it is fair to say that if you want to search a specific group of blogs, Technorati offers a better search solution than building a Google Custom Search Engine, or using a community search solution using Google CSE such as Lijit. That isn’t a failing of Lijit in any way, but of how Google handle supplemental results. 95% of blogs wouldn’t appear in the results.

Megite offer a custom meme tracker, so one of my intentions once I have my Technorati favorites cleaned up is to create a custom Megite Meme based on my favorites. I already use a custom Megite meme for things relating to SEO and Marketing.

I am intrigued by PersonalBee because they have just been acquired by Technorati. How that will be integrated with Technorati and especially Technorati favorites will be fascinating, and might provide the Digg style interface Amit is looking for. It might certainly provide more relevance, which the Technorati link authority currently used in my opinion doesn’t. If you are only interested in what A-listers, blog networks and theme developers write, Technorati’s main search is just your ticket.

I also wrote about Myfeedz a couple of months ago. It didn’t really offer what I was looking for, but for someone after a really casual reading experience it might be the answer.

Bumpzee is providing a great service for custom blog tracking, although ranking is based on votes, and they also recently introduced ranking based on traffic – the most popular content for the day. Whilst I could add 100s of sites to my No Nofollow | Dofollow community, I really want people to take the initiative and sign up themselves.

My Bumpzee community is really for people who want to go beyond memes as a way of interacting with their neighbours, and start interacting with related sites that also happen to share link love.

I should also point out, and I will most likely be writing about this tomorrow, that the most powerful way to interact with a blog that supports dofollow is to link to them with a trackback, not in a meme, but in reaction to interesting related content. All this running around commenting to get a link and patting each other on the back is just silly, and isn’t very productive. Whilst the masses now adopting the “I Follow” movement and the “D-list”might not think I know WTF I am talking about, it took a good 6 months to achieve critical mass.

Comments On Other People’s Blogs Aren’t Productive

One of the things I have grown to realise is that spreading answers to problems out on 100s of blogs might have been necessary to encourage the adoption of dofollow, but it wasn’t very productive. It might have helped build critical mass, but cornerstone content that others can point to is far more useful.
In recent weeks I have actually deleted by Google alerts for terms like “Dofollow”, “Nofollow”, and “no nofollow”.

When I created my list of dofollow & nofollow plugins, I had already been evangelising using dofollow plugins for more than 3 months on this blog, and I had been using them personally for 2 years. There had been some small “storms in the teacup” over those 2 years, but no concentrated effort had made a dent in the use of nofollow on comments, even up until February of this year.
I had converted many of my readers, but there were frequent questions about nofollow on other platforms, or alternative methods of disabling nofollow. I had responded to hundreds of comments and questions relating to the use of dofollow, but that content has very little longevity.

Just an example of longterm commitment, No-Nofollow.com was registered November 3rd 2006
It wasn’t developed, because I was waiting for critical mass, and for certain plugin solutions to become available.

There are constantly questions about how using dofollow affects SEO, and they are real concerns.
Easy answer though from Adam Lasnik:-

On a related note, though, and echoing Matt’s earlier sentiments… we hope and expect that more and more sites — including Wikipedia — will adopt a less-absolute approach to no-follow… expiring no-follows, not applying no-follows to trusted contributors, and so on.

I have covered various ways to improve your internal linking structure for months. I will save linking to it all for a followup post.

The Wheel Has Fallen Off the Dofollow Movement

If you have a car trundling along it can pick up speed gradually and become a mass that is very hard to stop. If a wheel falls off it will keep on racing ahead until it loses momentum and stops, because it is no longer connected to the body that gave it energy in the first place.

The car body grinds to a halt, and maybe if there is a spare wheel, and not too much damage will get going again.

For me, personally, the wheel has fallen off the dofollow movement. The reason being there is no longer an easy trail of information people can follow to the one most important ingredient, information.

I have seen people claiming that adopting dofollow and gaining lots of comments will improve their SEO. People are running around like headless chickens commenting on each others blogs for a temporary boost in traffic and comments, working their way down long lists, and writing the exact same comment on each blog. Sure they might be having some fun doing it, but the links and most of the comments are not providing valuable information.

The links being left are invariably to the root domain, and not to related content. If people were using trackbacks linking between related content, they would be able to pick and choose their anchor text.

I Am A Link Whore

Well that is what my friend Paul thinks, and I always respect his opinion.

The big question lies in how many people were actually using Technorati favorites for any real purpose prior to the current Technorati Favorites chain.
From what I have read, top bloggers have stated that they have never seen much traffic specifically from the Technorati Favorites page. It would be hard to judge, because there is suddenly a lot more attention being drawn to Technorati Favorites.

Lets have a look at how other people are using Technorati Favorites

• David Sifry – Founder of Technorati – 76 Favorites

A good 3rd of his favorites are actually search queries, not even blogs at all, and most of the remainder are technology and marketing blogs, mainly A-listers.
It looks like David is using the service as a Feed Reader rather than a favorite being a vote for a particular blog.

• Robert Scoble – Tech Blogger – 11 Favorites

One of Robert’s favorites is his old URL on WordPress.com, so it looks like he keeps things updated. Robert is a heavy user of Technorati, thus I think this is a significant indication.

• Dave Winer – The Father of RSS and OPML- No Favorites

Maybe Dave just loves all blogs, and playing with raw OPML rather than on Technorati

• Steve Rubel – Marketing Strategist – 28 Favorites
• Michael Arrington – Techcrunch Web 2.0 Supremo – No Favorites
• Jason Calacanis – Linkbaiter – Lover of dogs, and successful media mogul both online and offline – No Favorites

Actually I am not sure whether that is actually Jason’s profile, there seems to be something broken, because although that profile has claimed calacanis.com, calacanis.com is not listed under the profile. The same profile is still listed as claiming Engadget.

• Seth Godin – Marketing Consultant and Author – No Favorites
• Michelle Malkin – Political Blogger – 21 Favorites
• Arianna Huffington – Political Blogger – 37 Blogs
• Richard MacManus – Technology Blogger – 1 Favorite

This is interesting because Alex Iskold and Emre Sokullu have both written about Technorati recently, and in particular about search and Technorati decline, and Alex even suggested people fave RWW in the post.
Alex knows all about Technorati Favorites with the 3 he currently has, 2 of them blogs he writes on, and the other is his own Technorati favorites creating an interesting, never-ending loop.
Emre however has Alex pipped, having 4 Technorati Favorites, 2 being blogs he writes for, plus Techcrunch and GigaOm

I could carry on with this list all night, and I will find very few top bloggers that are actually using the full features of Technorati to improve their blog search results.

I Am Using Technorati Favorites

It seems to me that Technorati Favorites are not being used by the majority of top bloggers, so they could have very little complaint about how anyone else decides to use them.

Technorati Favorites help my productivity, and is an easy way for people to say “Hey I am Here, Listen To Me Too”.

The amount of people I have been favoriting recently has been escalating, through use of Technorati’s OPML import feature.

Features like that are there to be used. I encourage other people to use them as well.

Obviously there is a problem with detecting when other people favorite me, and providing reciprocation that I offer willingly, because I want to see what other people are talking about.
Fortunately Engtech has come up with a solution, which uses Technorati’s API

Here is a nice quote to finish off from Engtech, in response to some negativity to the favorites exchange.

@Ilya: The thing is, the Technorati Favorites doesn’t have any meaning to start with.

The top 100 favorites is a completely arbitrary ranking that Technorati should get rid of. Before these favorite exchanges came a long *very few* people used it or had even heard of it.

Creating Passionate Users, easily one of the best blogs anyone could have read only managed to hit around 190 favorites even with including a link to “add this to Technorati favorites” prominently on every page of their blog for over a year.

All that advertisement for Technorati with what to show for it?

I like how you can use it for creating a custom blog search engine, but other than that or using it as a poor man’s RSS the feature doesn’t *do* or *mean* anything.

If it wasn’t for the attention from the favorite exchange then people *still* wouldn’t be using it.

Lets see what the value is when PersonalBee gets integrated, or people do some cool things with OPML.

I can see nothing wrong with using powerful tools provided by Technorati to help with my online productivity, and especially allowing me to monitor what my readers are talking about, so I can respond to their needs.

Ponn was made a very generous offer not only providing a free training seminar for PRWeb to her readers, but the people who sign up will get $200 credited to their PRWeb Account to give the service a try.

I haven’t read all the terms, but it appears you will have 45 days to use your free credit.

You will have to phone into the seminar and pay call costs, but what I normally do for seminars is use Skype, which normally always works.

This is even available to existing users of PRWeb, as long as you follow Ponn’s instructions, which are very clear as I just followed them myself and signed up.

You do have to join Ponn’s mailing list as another condition – use a real address, Ponn seems lvery nice and polite during our email conversations, and I am sure will offer some useful information in the email list.

Most of my niche websites have always been “under the radar” – I have never really wanted to promote them through press releases.

What I might do is use PRWeb to promote the No Nofolow community on Bumpzee, and the general Do Follow movement.

$200 worth of promotion is not to be sneazed at, and the training will be interesting.

Hmm, what is good link text for this to Ponn

Free PRWeb Coupon

Here are the questions:-

Andy, congratulations on starting “No nollow, I follow, Dofollow BumpZee! Community”. To start off I would like to ask you what are the requirements/limitations for a blogger/blog to be accepted or rejected?

I have read in one of your posts that you call your dad a “computer evangelist”. If I may, I will call you “nonofollow evangelist”. As such do you wish that every single blogger out there would take down “nofollow” from the links in comments ad trackbacks?

Let say my blog ranks on Google at PR 8 but I like your idea to get rid of “nofollow”. Should I exercise caution doing that? I am sure the good folks at Google may see it strange that my site all of a sudden begins to give credit to so many links. What would you recommend to some one like that?

I guarantee there is no way you can guess the answers I gave, and it is also unique content I will not be publishing on this blog, so if you want to know the answers to any of these questions, you will have to read it there.

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