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NoFollow, DoFollow - Do You Know or Even Care?

30 April 2008 282 views One Comment

You may have heard some buzz about “NoFollow” or “DoFollow” and are wondering what do those terms mean? And more importantly, do you (or should you) care? If you’re a blogger, you should at least know what the terms mean and why, and probably should care (in my humble opinion.)

NoFollow refers to code in an HTML link that tells search engines not to follow that link:

i.e. <a rel=nofollow href="http://www.yourwebsite.com">Your Website</a>

We humans can still click on the link and be taken to the site it refers to, but the search engine robots see that and skip it.

Ok, so what’s the big deal with that?

Well, the big deal is that’s how search engines count “votes” for your site to (help) determine both your site’s popularity, positioning in search results and sometimes your page ranks. The idea is that the more links out there that point back to your site (otherwise known as backlinks), the more “authority” your site has. By having the nofollow code in there, it’s effectively telling the search engines, “Don’t count this link as a vote.”

Because of the ability of visitors to comment at your blog (which means site owners are no longer the only ones in control of links at their sites), blogs default to using the nofollow code in the links created by visitors leaving comments.

If you don’t use Akismet or some other spam comment filtering plugin and don’t have any kind of moderation settings in place for comments at your blog (which means anyone from anywhere can leave a comment and any kind of link along with it), then you’re better off leaving the nofollow code in place, because having links from your site to spammy sites or sites with “bad reputations in the eyes of the search engines” will actually hurt your site more than they will help.

But, if you do use spam comment filtering of some kind and you do at least look at the links left on your blog by commenters, then you might benefit from using a plug-in that removes the nofollow code from the links in your comments. Why? Because savvy bloggers know they can improve their own search engine rankings by creating backlinks to their sites through commenting on other blogs. And what do we all want for our own blogs? Comments! Interaction! Traffic!

If you make it known that you remove the nofollow code from your comment links, over time you’ll get more comments on your blog, which means more traffic, which means more people are reading what you’re publishing and your message has more reach. It’s called link love and the best way to get it is to give it first. Using a DoFollow plug-in for your WordPress blog is an easy way to give link love and reward your visitors who leave comments at your blog. A way to say an immediate, “Thank you for commenting here.”

In addition, you can join the DoFollow Blogroll and a) sport that cool “You Comment, I Follow” badge you see in my sidebar on your own blog, and b) get more exposure for your site.

There are many plug-ins available to remove the nofollow code from your comments, but the one I use is Nofollow Case by Case. Instead of summarily stripping the nofollow code from all links, I can choose which ones I want to remove and which ones I want to leave. It also allows me to control nofollow in areas other than just my comments.