One of my blogging goals for this month was to remove the *nofollow* tags on all links. I’m happy to report that this goal has now been completed.
Do Follow
Earlier this evening I installed the DoFollow WordPress Plugin and will now be sharing the link-love with all of the readers that take the time to comment on this blog.
The installation of this plugin is an absolute breeze. Simply download the plugin and extract the file to your plugins directory. Once the file has been uploaded to your host, enable the plugin through your WordPress dashboard and your readers begin to benefit!
Thanking the Readers
In an effort to give a little something back to everyone that takes the time to share their comments on this site, I thought that removing the *nofollow* tag was a little way that I can say thank you. Now when you add a comment on my site, you will receive a linkback from me.
While I am aware that this can be abused to receive free linkbacks, I have faith in the readers of this site because everyone has been so supportive of growing a real community and helping each other out whenever possible.
Hopefully all of you enjoy the linkbacks from my PR4 blog and are able to see some benefit to your own sites with the additional linkbacks.
If you haven’t already, I encourage you to remove the *nofollow* tags from your site and join the D-List of blogs that follow – I follow, do you?
{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
Happy to hear that you have joined the dofollow movement! I’ll happily add you to the list!
Thanks Court!
Good idea to remove the no follow, im a loyal reader. Keep up the good work!
Jennifer
You’ll have to forgive me but the double link is screaming spam to me so I removed the link in your comment as it did not pertain to the content at all, which I try to limit in-comment links to relevant pages only.
What is this Dofollow thingy?
Can you elaborate for us less geeky BSG fans? 😉
Sure, my apologies for not going into it more in my post.
Basically, most blogs by default include a tag called the “nofollow” in their links that tell search engines to ignore the link and not follow (or crawl) that link. The “nofollow” was created primarily to try and reduce or prevent comment spam.
Now, the DoFollow plugins (there are a few different plugins available) basically just go in and strip out the “nofollow” tag in the links. It is possible to edit the files of your theme to do this manually but the plugin makes it much easier.
With the “nofollow” removed, when my site is crawled by the search bots, they will now index and crawl the links of the people making comments. In terms of the search engines, that will now count as a new link inbound to your site and that should help your site’s rankings.
Does that make sense?
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Hi Derek
I’m glad to share with you I’ve also remove the ‘nofollow’ in comments and join the Dofollow movement.
Feel free to check out my post and drop me some comments.
Thanks!
It’s great to see that the dofollow community is still growing. Welcome to the community!
I removed my “nofollows” not knowing there was this whole movement thingy going on. I just didn’t feel like punishing my few loyal commenters anymore.
I’d seen a few sites discussing the dofollow movement but I didn’t realize it was quite as big as what I have seen so far.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing that you have also removed it from your site and are rewarding your commenters.
I followed the moment too. Though mine works a bit different, you have to have commented at least 5 times and the script will remove the nofollow attribute from the link on your comment.
Hopefully will cut down on useless comments 😉
Yeah, I’ve seen a few sites that are using a similar approach although I know yours is custom code. If I see it is something that is being abused, I might have to look into that as well but so far so good.
Thats great, welcome to the community, although I am only a recent member myself!
Thanks for the welcome and for becoming a member of the community yourself. I’ve still got to add the plugin to my personal finance blog to be a full-fledged member though. 🙂
Derek – I see you’ve now been able to score this one off your to-do list!! That’s great 🙂
Yay! Another Do-Follower! =)
@betshopboy – Thanks for stopping by and for being another blog in the nofollow crowd. I’ll be stopping by your site when I can catch up on emails.
@BrownBaron – Thanks for the welcome!
@Melanie – Thanks, this was one of my goals for the month and that has now been completed. I noticed you are a member of the “nofollow” crowd as well so welcome to you too.
@Kelly – It took me too long but I finally got it down and haven’t noticed too much spam since then, although there have been some.
hi derek,
I read your posts and just wanted to add:
actually google follows and indexes sites linked with a no follow tag. It seems to just not spread PR through those links.
And that is not even sure.
Cheers,
John
John, you’re right as I have read numerous articles that have demonstrated that the search engines are still indexing and following links with the “nofollow” tag.
Removing the tag just eliminates the possibility of people not receiving the credit for their links.
I follow too 🙂
Yes, that is true actually.Google follows those links.A no-follow atribute means just ” I don’t give credit to that link, is not on my site.”
Thank You,
The problem with do-follow is people will spam. If a blog is good enough then the blog owner won’t need to have do-follow because people will comment to put their point of view accross, not to gain a back link.
The BBC is a perfect example of this. There are no links in the forums and blogs, yet they have many users.
However, when a blog is starting and it wants to get a upper hand, their is no harm in attracting people who want do-follow links, because some will become hooked, so even if you change to no-follow, people will still comment.
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