When setting out to do link building for this blog, I was quickly frustrated with the abundance of nofollow links I was getting. I sought out dofollow search engines and directories, but was disappointed. Each one I found had too few blogs listed, had nofollow blogs listed, or had only blogs with very low PageRank. So, I started a project to build an accurate list of dofollow blogs.
I collected over 2000 links from existing public sources and worked with a team of human judges to visit each blog and verify if it was dofollow. I have learned a lot and met a lot of great bloggers in the process. Not surprisingly, about half of the links we verified (which were supposedly dofollow) were actually nofollow.
Classifying blogs is not as easy as you might think. They must have comments. If they use a comment plug-in like Disqus, you have to verify that the commenter’s link goes to their blog, and not a Disqus profile page. Then there are plugins like Lucia’s Link Love that may allow dofollow links in the body of the post, or only allow dofollow links after a certain number of approved posts (I’ve been categorizing these as “somefollow”). And of course, any given blog could change at any time. So an important design consideration for this tool was to make it easy to re-check blogs on an ongoing basis.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, getting dofollow blog backlinks is not the only link building strategy you should consider. It is a strategy that mostly makes sense for new Web sites. Your site will only increase PageRank by getting links from sites that have a higher PageRank, so it makes sense to target blogs with a higher PageRank. Unfortunately this makes high PageRank sites more of a target, but we’ve found a healthy distribution of medium PageRank sites.
Lastly, I created a very basic categorization system for the blogs. Of course, when seeking backlinks from blogs it is best to comment in your area of expertise. Surprisingly, the largest categories are Technology and People. I would have thought that Marketing and Business blogs where the most likely to be giving away dofollow links, but I was wrong.
You can evaluate the list using the PageRush dofollow search engine. The search engine searches all of the blogs on the dofollow list. To get full access to the entire list on an ongoing basis, as well as OPML RSS export, sign up for PageRush Site Booster today!