Why “Do Follow”?

Back in the day when blogs were first starting, nasty spammers used to abuse blog commenting, and spam the comments with their yuckky links, trying to promote all kinds of junky porny gambly sites.

To combat this, Google implemented the “no follow” tag. This tag was picked up by wordpress and impelemented for URLs in comments as standard in their scripts. What it means is that URLs in the comments field are ignored by google, and pagerank and indexing are not improved for the target sites, from these links. The expectation was that this would disuade spammers from commenting on blogs.

Did this work? Well, the over 8000 spam comments caught on just one of my blogs tells me that spammers do not seem much perterbed by the fact that my blog comments are “no followed”.

What does work is the Askimet SPAM plugin.

Unfortunately, the “no follow” tag did have one unforeen consequence. Folks that would place legitimate comments on blogs were also disuaded from doing this because they didn’t get any “link juice” from commenting, either.

There is now a “movement” (for want of a better word!) to remove the “no follow” tag from the comments to encourage others to leave comments on your blog. In wordpress, the “no follow” tag can be be turned off by the installation of a “no follow” plugin.

By advertising your blog as a “DO follow” blog, you are encouraging others to comment.

Here We Go…This blog is now “do follow” blog..Lets start commenting but not spamming because its moderated dailly.