Blog comments have long been a link building tool for many SEOs (unfortunately). Before the nofollow tag, comment abuse ran rampant, and now with the nofollow tag in place, many people search high and low for blogs that have it removed.

I am personally against the nofollow tag. It’s one of the most absurd ideas to come out of the search engines in a long time. It has done nothing to stop the daily influx of automated comment spam it sought to stop.

That being said, I am also not one to remove the nofollow attribute from blog comments. All that accomplishes is attracting more attention from spammers. Next thing you know you’re on a few public yesfollow spam lists and probably hundreds of private ones. I can think of a few ways to turn a yesfollow blog into a good link building scheme that in the end, only benefits you. Luckily there are easier and safer ways to build link equity.

That’s because real businesses have real business models. So much of the web has been created by throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Only then do many entrepreneurs mold a business model around a website and most of the time unsuccessfully.

As the Internet grows into it’s teenage years, much as with real children, we see it starting to comprehend economic logic. Making money costs money. The majority of successful businesses around the world are built on the foundation of ROI (return on investment) not ROTSBFC (return on time spent building free customers).

Don’t get me wrong, the days of home based pocket change startups aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. But unfortunately the percentage of those ventures that succeed is rapidly shrinking due to business people with investment capital entering the market online.