Would You Follow For $10?
What is Dofollow Worth?
It is sometimes amazing to see what happens when a blogger takes on a persona. As he writes more and more in that role it seems as though the persona develops until it is almost a real personality. Although I don’t know John Chow personally, I’ve never met him, I think he might be case in point for this.
John Chow has a persona of as the “Evil Blogger.” I think that the persona is very important to his blog. It drives some of his ideas, and how he implements them. He recently had a post about buying Do follow links. Basically, the idea is that he would turn on do follow tags for anyone would would subscribe at a rate of $10/month.
What is do follow? Do follow is a new blogging movement to turn off the “rel-nofollow” tags in comments. “Rel=nofollow” is a tag which stops Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines from using that link as a basis for their search engine rankings.
So Why Is John Evil? Although the comments on John’s post were generally positive, it does take a bit of an evil personality to take a movement intended to benefit all blogger and try to make a profit off of it. Not that there is any thing wrong with him doing it after all, his blog, his rules, but it is an exploit many would not have thought of, or would have rejected if they had.
Would I charge for Do follow? Although I have been considering implementing do follow on this site, (I’m not sure if my spam filtering is good enough or not), I would certainly never charge for it if I did. I think that it might hurt his community, as it makes some of his readers, those who don’t subscribe, into somewhat second class citizens. Blog-Op has a similar post to this, and the commenting consensus there is they would never charge for Do follow, and it may hurt John in the long run.
Would I pay for Do follow? I wouldn’t pay for Do follow either. I don’t think comments are worth $10/month, even on John’s site. I don’t know how Google’s algorithm works for sure, no one does, but I suspect it may filter out comments anyway. Furthermore, paying for those links might be too much temptation to be a bit of a comment spammer. After all, if I was paying for it I would want my money’s worth.
So what do you think? Is it worth it to pay for Do follow links? What would you pay for a Do Follow link on a PR 6 blog? Would you ever charge for the links?
on May 22nd, 2007 at 12:09 pm
I admired John’s unique take on it but I wouldn’t sign up for it. I think it’s penalizing/milking the very people who drive the traffic that leads to his current revenue.
on May 22nd, 2007 at 7:01 pm
That’s kind of what I thought. Seems to me like it isn’t very much money for the potential downside.
But then again he does have the $10,000/month blog, so he could very well know better than me
on June 10th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
I have to say that if anyone pays the $10 then they are dumb. They are putting way too much stock into one site. I think the sillyness comes from the payers and not John Chow. Good for him if he can persuade people to do it, but I don’t think it is worth it unless he is doing the work. People have put too much stock into him. This could hurt him.
on June 12th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
I don’t think that it will hurt him too much, just because the internet has a short memory. If it doesn’t pan out, he just won’t bring it up again and it will be swept under the rug. Any bloggers who find him over the next several months won’t even know about it
on November 1st, 2007 at 4:33 am
$10 is worth it. People will buy…