If you are like me in the MMO world, the bread and butter of SEO is finding dofollow sites to put links. Linking building all day everyday. And when you find them you love them, and get to work putting out links. If the site is an article site, you put up articles. If it is a blog, you put up comments. If the site is bookmarks, you put links. Then you do it again for your next site. After awhile you have a dofollow list of sites and a system for SEO. Here is where things can go wrong, many sites for whatever reason switch to nofollow. This makes dofollow lists obsolete after a time.

Your List

Recently, many of my favorite sites have gone nofollow. Here’s the thing, they will not tell you they have gone nofollow. Unless, you follow that site’s blog or something, there is no way that you will hear that the site has gone nofollow. Meanwhile, you are wasting a lot of time putting up links on a site that is still on your dofollow list. For me that means Xanga, A1Articles, and a number of social bookmarking sites have absorbed my work and not given me a return. Some only start nofollow at a certain time (like Xanga), meaning my past work is still dofollow, but others everything is suddenly nofollow (like A1Articles). All past work is now nofollow.

Other People’s List

I get so frustrated that dofollow lists do not keep up with their sites. Understandably, most dofollow lists do not maintain the list as a main source of revenue, but just as a traffic grab. So, they have people submitting sites, they get reviewed, and then placed on their list. Unfortunately, the sites do not get a check-up. The site switches to nofollow and nowhere in their mind is a thought to notify this dofollow list or directory of the change. Therefore, dofollow lists get outdated quickly and seeming can wind-up 50% nofollow. Do not follow any list blindly.

The best thing to do is download a dollow link highlighter to your browser and keep it on. It is annoying, but if you are a professional SEO/MMO person, then it would be a necessity. Just make sure the highlighter captures both rel=”external nofollow” AND rel=”nofollow”. I was using a popular link highlighter that was not finding the rel=”external nofollow” and that had me wasting my time. Try googling the Quirk SearchStatus, it does me a good job.