There is an ongoing controversy going on in our lovely blogosphere and it all originates with Andy Beard’s idea of making a great fuss over Google’s infamous “nofollow” link attribute.

Basically, it all started with a Bumpzee community, which promoted the drop of the nofollow tag from blog comments. For a period, everything was just peachy. People who adhered to this movement saw themselves as champion fighters against the evil Google, meaningful comments were pouring in and the community itself became one of the most respected ones on Bumpzee.

Well… it all went downhill afterwards. You see, all the modern blogging platforms slap a nofollow tag to comments by default, so before this movement came to life, comment spam was restricted to a few confused webmasters. When this community became popular though, shit began to fly and hit the fan in the most uncomfortable manner possible. Dofollow blog comments became the newest weapon in the arsenal of every decent spammer outthere and of course of those indecent ones too.

It didn’t take long for the blogosphere to react. Dave Naylor’s post is perhaps the most known example and extremely spot on while we are at it. Andy Beard of course defended his position, claiming that building a community comes first. One of his remarks in that post has attracted my attention:

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

With all the respect that Andy Beard deserves, this statement is just plain wrong.

Case in point:

A new thread pops up on DigitalPoint, let’s say… this one

What happens next? Well let’s take a look at some of these blogs, who are supposedly dofollow.

First target: This blog. Warning: the language there is quite colorful. Either way, a DUD and one that backfired badly.

Second target: the Shandyking blog. This one was a genuine dofollow blog at one point, but it backfired even worse . And the really sad part is that the blog owner got slapped with a huge Google penalty, the type that affects the SERP’s. If this doesn’t prove that Andy Beard is wrong, I don’t know what will.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that posting on dofollow blogs immediately equals spam. This is one of those gray areas. If you comment in a meaningful fashion on 3 dofollow blogs per day and you sign with your name, you’re as white hat as it gets, if on the other hand you comment something like “great post” on 1000 blogs per day and sign with “buy shit online” you’re the worst kind of spammer.

So how is this dofollow comment posting being done. One way is to hunt DigitalPoint for dofollow blog lists, but than you would be a lazy douchebag. If you want to do it like the pros, this walkthrough will be extremely helpful. Be aware though that some of the advice there has a spammish taint to it.

Final verdict: Most webmasters that have a dofollow blog will expect to have people posting for the sole reason of getting a backlink, as a matter of fact they are counting on it. What they do not want is spam. Learn the difference between spam and a good post and you can use this method safely. So where does this technique belong? Well… in the Zone of course. the Gray Hat Zone. As long as you are using it responsibly, there’s no danger in it.