Creating Dofollow Links On Delicious

Delicious is well known for playing around with their nofollow policy. One of the more recent nofollow discoveries occurred when they relaunched their new design. For example, when you visit a user’s bookmark page (http://delicious.com/username) it defaults to the “Regular View”. However, if you clicked on the “Full View” link, it would display the links as dofollow (without the nofollow attribute.) They quickly closed that loophole, but now they’re up to something new and something much more intentional.

Thanks to Raven’s Automated Link Checker, I discovered that links that had been saved in our Link Manager had become dofollow. After doing some investigation, it appears that Delicious intentionally removed the nofollow attribute from the “Everyone’s Bookmarks for” page. If a unique link has been bookmarked by more than one person, this page becomes accessible via a link on every account that bookmarked it. The link then has two dofollow links on it, one of which uses actual anchor text instead of the URL.

How to Create a Dofollow Link on Delicious

The methodology for creating a dofollow link on Delicious is incredibly simple. Follow these steps to get the best results.

1. Try to be the first person to bookmark the link. That way you’ll be able to control the anchor text that’s used in the link
2. After you bookmark the link, have at least one other Delicious user bookmark it. Have that account use similar tags, but don’t completely copy each other. Also, it’s probably wise to mix up accounts that bookmark the same links, and you may want to consider having the other account use a proxy server or different IP.
3. Although step two is all you need to do, it may be helpful to actually build a few links to the “Everyone’s Bookmarks for” page, just to make sure it gets spidered, referenced and rated by search engines.

Update

As you have no doubt figured out from reading the comments or from other sources, there are still some “no follow” aspects to how Delicious set up these pages. However, Loren Baker had some good insight on this situation:

Yahoo DOES index and identify new sites and pages via Delicious.
Various engines have been known to ignore the REP commands, especially Yahoo and MSN. Scraper sites do not scrape Meta data, but do scrape the HTML coding (without the NoFollow). And again, Meta No Follow will assist with indexing if there are links to the page from other sources. Also check out Robots.txt vs Rel=Nofollow vs Meta Robots Nofollow.