Stop NoFollow and Say Yes to Do Follow
If you haven’t noticed, the “Do Follow” movement is gaining momentum in the blog-o-sphere. Of course, if this is the first you’ve heard of “Do Follow,” let me provide a brief explanation, suggest a few helpful plugins, and give a quick list of other bloggers that have enabled “Do Follow.”
What is “Do Follow?”
“Do Follow” is an easier way of saying “NoFollow disabled.” Okay — what does that mean? When comments are submitted, WordPress (by default) sets an attribute for the comment to nofollow. If you view the page source for the comments at a blog that hasn’t tampered with the default setting, you’ll see something like this near one of the comments:
rel='external nofollow'
or
rel='nofollow'
That setting tells search engines to NOT follow that external link which means your comment on someone’s blog does NOT count as a link to your blog. When that attribute is disabled, or set to “Do Follow”, the attribute appears differently:
rel='external'
Why should you care whether your comment counts as a link back to your blog? You don’t have to, but if you want to increase your search engine page ranking, then you should. An easy way to see the impact of “Do Follow” is to look at my Technorati rankings for both of my blogs.
In the provided screen capture, notice how this blog gets linked to from 60 other blogs. These external links help elevate my Technorati ranking to 70,465 (not very high but I’m also very new). My other blog, Brothers In Blog, gets linked to from 2 other blogs which places it at 1,942,979 (according to Technorati). In the case of TechTraction, some of those external links come directly from comments I placed on other blogs. Now comments don’t just get your name out in the blog-o-sphere, those comments actually count as a link back to your blog provided the blog on which you commented disabled nofollow.
Do Follow Plugins:
There are several WordPress plugins available to help disable the default nofollow setting. Originally I installed Link Love. This plugin allows you to set a required comment threshold, which means that “Do Follow” only occurs after someone has commented a certain number of times. My blog is still very new and I need to provide as much comment incentive as possible. When I stopped to think it through, I decided that a comment threshold didn’t provide the right type of incentive for my situation. I removed that plugin and quickly switched over to DoFollow. All it required was a quick download, placement in my WordPress plugin directory, and a simple activation back on the Dashboard’s plugin section. Very quick and very painless.
Who does “Do Follow?”
Here is the part of the post that starts to help perpetuate the “Do Follow” meme. What follows is a growing list of blogs that have disabled the default nofollow setting. If your blog is one that has jumped on this bandwagon, then follow the instructions outlined below and help keep this movement rolling forward.
Here are the rules of the D-List:
***Begin to copy here***
1. Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and link back to the blog that put you on the list in the paragraph. This isn’t a suggestion. You need to break up the duplicate content. Someone took the time to add you so the least you can do is give them an extra link back.
2. Copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your blog. If you would like a different keyword for your blog then change it when you do your post and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword.
3. Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.
4. Add at least 1 new blog that you KNOW us using the DO FOLLOW plugin to the list in the “My Adds” section. (Add no more than 5!) Let the people you’ve added know, so that they can keep the list going!
5. Leave relevant comments on the blogs listed and get a link back to your site thanks to Do Follow!
My Adds:
Ben at The Instigator (Ben provides Do Follow links after readers have made at least 3 comments)
Blog I co-author with my brother: Brothers in Blog
Original List:
FuzzyFuture
TechTraction
GeekySpeaky
David Paul Robinson
Simple Kind Of Life
3DayMom
BuyMeBlog
The Hockey Dad
Midlife Musings
Utterly Geek
Whatever I Feel Like
My Dandelion Patch
Surviving NJ
BizMark Tech
Two Dog Zoo
TDZ Travel
Body, Mind & Solar
MidLifeMusings
HomeBizBlogger
Confessions of a Housewife
Andy Beard
Randa Clay Design
Solo Technology
Improve your Online Business
HarpzOn.com
Just Thinkin’
IHelpYouBlog
AskShane.org
There was a time that nofollow made sense. These days, however, with comment spam filters such as Akismet, nofollow is no longer necessary. I got involved because I originally read about the “Do Follow” concept back at The Instigator; however, Chris back over at FuzzyFuture (another favorite blog of mine) recently included me as one of his “Do Follow” adds back at his blog. That inclusion encouraged me to write this post and help further the “Do Follow” cause. Thanks Chris.
Please Note: Comments have been closed on this post. Thanks for visiting (01/02/2007)
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Filed under: Blogging Related
I’m seeing more and more posts like this nowadays. It’s great.
A while back I wrote about why you should add DoFollow to your blog design and it prompted quite a few comments.
Yes, the attitude change towards nofollow has been a a real plus for new bloggers like myself. Thank goodness for comment spam plugins like akismet.
[...] For more information about this movement, settings and plugins to get the job easier for u visit techtraction [...]
Thanks for the post, was very userful, I have just installed the pluggin in my blog… I am a quite new blogger and I hope it helps me as well!
[...] the steps from techtraction.com and fuzzyfuture, I have just installed the plugin Dofollow in my blog. By default, the link [...]
Frucomerci,
Glad to hear you’ve installed the dofollow plugin. It takes a little time to see the benefits but if you keep posting on a regular basis and commenting on other sites, you will start to see traffic at your site pick up. And DoFollow will be part of the reason.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting.
[...] the steps from techtraction.com and fuzzyfuture, I have just installed the plugin Dofollow in my [...]
[...] Sean of seandinner.com. J David of jdavidmacor.com. Tara of graphicdesignblog.co.uk. Asgeir of asgeirhoem.no. Bret of techtraction.com. [...]
[...] Sean of seandinner.com. J David of jdavidmacor.com. Tara of graphicdesignblog.co.uk. Asgeir of asgeirhoem.no. Bret of techtraction.com. [...]
glad to hear that you have added dofollow plugin. i wish if wikipedia also does the same.
yeah you are right bro or else everyone shld not link to wikipedia.
Thank you bhangra and parm for the dofollow support. Always to glad to hear from others that are part of the dofollow movement.
Bret, thank you for supporting the movement, it’s great to see our army of smart bloggers is growing
Sleeping Dude
http://www.howtowakeupearly.com
Site for early risers
Hi SD,
Thanks for the positive feedback regarding DoFollow and stopping by the site. The positive DoFollow feedback has been overwhelming. I’m glad to be part of such a powerful and positive web movement.
[...] Techtraction [...]
Very good information on DoFollow, exactly what I was looking for! I’m going to go with the DoFollow plug-in, I agree that the threshold probably doesn’t have much value… I need as many comments as possible
Glad to help, and I’m still very satisfied with the DoFollow plugin.
Thanks for the comment Michael.
Its ironic that many bloggers talk about this but then they actually use no follow.
Interesting comment. I haven’t come across anyone that talked about the benefits of DoFollow but then didn’t enable it. All of the bloggers that have supported this movement have done so with action and with words.
I have additional thoughts on the topic of DoFollow since this original post and think I’ll need to craft a new post to express these thoughts.
Thanks for the comment Bape.
So what is the point of commenting and reading other people’s blogs if you are not going to get the link back…why bother visiting them?
Getting a link back from a comment is a nice benefit to leaving a comment; however, many people just enjoy reading and commenting and expect nothing in return. I usually don’t worry whether I get a link back or not. I do appreciate the link back but usually I’ll comment on something if I have something to add to the discussion. However, if I have to register or don’t get some type of link enablement in the comment, then I won’t bother. I like to be able to easily comment and at the very least have the link back to my blog appear attached to my name. Whether nofollow is disabled really doesn’t matter to me.
[...] Sean of seandinner.com. J David of jdavidmacor.com. Tara of graphicdesignblog.co.uk. Asgeir of asgeirhoem.no. Bret of techtraction.com. [...]