Blog commenting is one of the earliest ways to get backlinks to your site (or if you’re a link builder, to your client’s site).  Although many seasoned internet marketers and SEO personnel no longer see this activity as an effective link building technique because aside from the implementation of the nofollow tag, which allows blog owners to stop the link juice drain from their blogs, Google seems to give less and less worth to the links found in the comment section. All these in an effort to make it harder for spammers to get a quality backlink.

But others still believe that there’s some value left in blog commenting as long as you know where to comment and how. In this link building post, I explained the attributes of a good backlink. One of the most important factors to consider among those I enumerated is if the blog you’re about to comment on is a dofollow site.

Why DoFollow?

Before the nofollow tag created a stir in the blogosphere, all incoming links are counted as valid. Spammers took advantage of this by leaving irrelevant and ugly comments on a lot of blogs to harvest backlinks to their sites and raise their SERP ranking. Google did not like it and implemented the dreaded nofollow tag. Yahoo and Bing (MSN then) supported this initiative as well.

Travel back in time and see Google’s explanation when this first came about.

Since then, checking for dofollow blogs has become prerogative when you’re using blog commenting to build links. The search engines’ spiders sort of ignore (do not crawl) links with the nofollow tag, therefore, they are not considered valid backlinks.

How Do We Find DoFollow Blogs/Sites?

First of all, you must know that there is no “dofollow” tag. A blog or site is considered dofollow when it has no nofollow tags especially in the comment section. So, to check if a site is dofollow or not, you must look for nofollow tags.

To do this manually, you need to look at the HTML source page of a site (For Firefox, click the View->Page Source or CTRL+U. For IE, click View->Source.) At the source page window, click CTRL+F and look for <rel=”nofollow”>.

But finding one nofollow tag does not automatically make a blog nofollow. Look at the text surrounding the tag and assess which part of the blog it is located. Is it on the sidebar? Is it on the footer area? Is it on the comment section? If there are no nofollow tags in the comment section, even if there are nofollow tags in other parts of the blog, that blog is still considered dofollow.

But of course, this procedure is very tedious and time-consuming. There’s got to be a faster way of finding dofollow blogs to comment on.

Luckily there a few tools that you can use to easily check for the presence of nofollow tags. If you’re using Firefox, you can install some plugins that automatically highlight nofollow tags while you’re browsing.

• SEO Quake
• SEO for Firefox
• Search Status
• NoDofollow

If you want something that can find dofollow blogs, below are some  that you can use. They work like ordinary search engines. The only difference is that they only return dofollow sites in the search results.

• http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver
• http://www.seo-traffic-guide.de
• http://www.ezbusinessneeds.com/dofollow.php
• http://www.commenthunt.com

But if you still want something more automated, there are auto blog commenter tools that you can get for free and can give you a decent number of blogs to comment on. Aside from returning a list of dofollow blogs, these tools often allow you to filter the search results based on pagerank, comment-friendly plugins such KeywordLuv, CommentLuv and Top and Commenters, and other criteria.

And they have auto-commenting feature, which means that you can provide a set of comment info such as name, email address, website, and the comment itself and it will be automatically posted to all the blogs in the list. That’s the easiest way, yes, but I do not recommend it because that’s spamming.

Real comments are always relevant to the topic of the blog, and better if it could provide value to the discussion. Any generic, often senseless and ridiculous comments, I always regard as spam. That includes short comments like “Great post”, “Thanks for posting”, “I like your post”, etc.

So when you use these tools, please use them only to find blogs and not to post automated comments. Having said that, here are some of the free yet useful tools that I found and use myself:

• Comment Kahuna
• The Free Blog Commenter
• Fast Blog Finder

I have to point out however that some sites you will find using these tools–the dofollow search engines and auto-commenting tools–are no longer dofollow or have closed the comments section. Blog owners often do this once they find that they’ve been included in some dofollow lists and are inundated with a lot of spam comments as a result. So comment, but do not spam. You can check out my tips on non-spammy blog commenting practices if you don’t the difference between a good comment and a spam comment.

If you have any reactions, questions or any free tools that I have not mentioned here, feel free to leave something in the comment section.

blog commenting, Comment Kahuna, Fast Blog Finder, NoDoFollow, Search Status, SEO for Firefox, SEO Quake, The Free Blog Commenter Link Building, Tips, Tools