I Dofollow

Published by neil on December 20th, 2007

No, that headline is not an announcement that I’m a serial stalker, it’s all about giving out the love to you, dear blog reader (but only if you comment).

Dofollow is the antithesis of nofollow.

Nofollow, is a directive to search engines to ignore a hyperlink and not “follow it” to the destination, thus ignoring the connection between the source link and destination web page. The nofollow directive is generally found in the clickable name links on blog post comments and is used as a determent to spam comments. Comment spammers are using blogs to create links to the sites they are promoting as every outgoing link from a site is a tiny thumbs-up for that site, something which is very important with some search engines, particularly Google. To clarify, if I create a link to your blog, then in one way or another, I am validating your content as relevant to mine.

Wordpress blogs by default, automatically insert the nofollow directive into the links of commenters and was implemented as a reaction to the tsunami of blog spam comments in recent times. But with the accessibility and power of spam blocking services, this has been decreasing in necessity - and although the spam links held less value to Google, I doubt anyone will try and argue that spam comment attempts lessened.

I dofollow

Thanks to Akismet spam protection and a the Comment Timeout plugin I have to manually delete a massive 1 or 2 spam comment attempts per week (I know, it’s such a chore), despite hundreds of automated and manual spam comment attempts weekly - Akismet does a great job.

So I decided to spread the love and appreciation to you commenters on this blog and disable the automatic nofollow directive on blog comments. This means that when you comment with a link to your blog or website, that link will be valid as far as search engines are concerned.

What does this look like then?

You cannot tell the difference unless you look at the page source. With nofollow in place, a hyperlink begins like this:

<a rel=”external nofollow” href=”http://…

without nofollow:

<a rel=”external ” href=”http://…

If you have a Wordpress blog and want to spread the dofollow love, just install the Dofollow plugin.

Tags: blogging, dofollow, nofollow, spam
Posted in TechGeek |