I’ve jumped on the Dofollow bandwagon

22nd November 2007

I’ve jumped on the Dofollow bandwagon

posted in Administrative by themaiden |

And Perishable Press is responsible. Removing ‘nofollows’ from a Wordpress blog is remarkably easy to do and you needn’t install a plugin to do it, as explained in “The One-Minute Dofollow WordPress Upgrade” and in the Industrial Strength WordPress Dofollow Upgrade for those wanting that little extra. I recommend the latter. It took me less that five minutes, but I’m not a half bad WordPress hacker, though this blog is not indication of that. I haven’t done anything with it in a long time.

If ‘my word for it’ isn’t proof enough and you need to know why you ought to follow suit, take a look at Death to NoFollow.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 11:29 am and is filed under Administrative. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On November 23rd, 2007, Mana said:

I’ve moved away from nofollow a while back. However, I found out that most of my readers don’t know what it means, so I should have posted a more extensive explanation. I experienced no increase in spam. I appreciate the freedom to tag links of my choosing as rel=nofollow. I don’t believe in treating all who contribute comments to my site as spammers by indiscriminately tagging all with nofollow.

There are some concerns that stripping nofollow may signal to google rank a link-selling site. Matt Cutts said the algorithm is more complicated than that, and reputable sites will not be hurt. If you have a link-tracking tool you can see Cutts himself chooses which links get followed in the post mentioned earlier–all but the Berkley College Newspaper…

2 On November 23rd, 2007, themaiden said:

Mana,

I’ve thought about this nofollow/dofollow thing for several months at least. I know there is concern about Google’s reaction, but Google can’t force nofollow if enough people ignore it. The ‘increase in spam’ argument never made much sense to me. Askimet grabs most of the spam attempts anyway. And, yes, I don’t want everyone posting a comment to be treated badly by default.

3 On November 25th, 2007, Jeff_ said:

Ahh, at last something for which I am more than happy to be responsible! I am glad that you found the articles useful, and definitely appreciate the links. Thank you.

As for Google possible penalizing people who dofollow their comment links, I say, “who cares?” I guess if you are hung up on Google for traffic, and are desperate for that magical thing they call PageRank, then sure, you might want to obsess and worry about sharing the love with your commentators.

However, if you blog because you love it, and because you want to help people, share information, and produce great content, then I say, “don’t worry about it.” You already have your reward, and certainly don’t need ‘ol Google pushing you around.

Personally, I chose to “jump on the dofollow bandwagon” because I want to show a little appreciation to people who take the time to share their thoughts on my blog. I just love it when they do that, and really don’t care what Google (or anyone else) thinks about it.

4 On November 25th, 2007, themaiden said:

Jeff,

I think that last paragraph of yours sums up the strongest of my motivations. Real commenters deserve some linkage.

5 On February 8th, 2008, iFrame said:

It will be possible to you interestingly, here we discussed about dofollow:
http://www.randomjabber.com/blog/article/why-are-the-comment-links-on-your-blog-set-to-nofollow/

6 On February 8th, 2008, themaiden said:

Thanks iFrame. I’ll take a look.

7 On February 11th, 2008, Safety Corner said:

I hope spammers will not take advantage of your dofollow policy. Why not add an antispam pluggin to aviod spams.

8 On February 11th, 2008, themaiden said:

Safety,

As I said in the second comment of this thread, Askimet kills virtually all attempts at spam. A few get through but those are easily found and deleted.

9 On February 19th, 2008, Charles said:

hello dear.. yeah i agree we with you all, we don’t like spam for sure.. hey.. can we upgrade blogger to dofollow? or blogger always do follow? thanks

10 On March 3rd, 2008, Len Milford said:

having dofollow links will definitely get more comments to your blogs, which will drive more traffic and repeat visitors.

11 On March 3rd, 2008, themaiden said:

That’s what I hope, Len.

12 On March 3rd, 2008, themaiden said:

Charles,

I don’t know about blogger, but I doubt you have much room to work. I can edit core files to my hearts content but it would insane for a service like Blogger to allow that.

13 On March 11th, 2008, CityBlogger said:

I am a firm believer in the “follow” tag. It encourages participation and creates an incentive to interact that later often grows to a sense of community.

14 On April 2nd, 2008, San Diego DJ said:

I agree with the CityBlogger, it does encourage more participation because people feel like they getting something back. Whether it helps your rankings, or traffic, whatever the case, people are more comfortable with this. If people support you, then why not do the same? I’m putting my blog back up and I will be installing this dofollow plugin. Enjoy your week and best wishes

15 On May 13th, 2008, Pradeep said:

Like Mana me to facing the same problem i have adopted the dofollow way back but my reader never noticed it and

I think i need post or 2 to explain what dofollow is and how it will benefits my readers