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IN Wordpress Plugins

No Follow … Do Follow … What Is All This Business?

posted Friday, July 18th, 2008

WordPress, by default adds a no-follow tag to links in comments.

What that means in very simple terms is that a Search Engine Bot should not follow that link. Your commentator receives no link benefit from this and gets no page rank credit from Google. The reason why this is a default action in WordPress is to combat comment spam, to stop people from leaving meaningless comments just to get a link back to their websites.

However, all this does is inconvenience the real posters who are genuinely contributing to the discussion. The no-follow tag has not served its pupose and has not stopped spam flooding your comments. Best option is to just use the Akismet plugin (comes with WordPress) for that and be done with it.

So let’s come back to the people who are contributing effectively to a discussion on your blog. Why are they being punished? They are giving something, they should get something back. It is a fair exchange. And it is a win-win situation as you can be at the receiving end as well by posting comments on blogs that do-follow links.

So from today onwards, this blog is officially a DO FOLLOW blog.

You can use a very simple, set it and forget it plugin called Semiologic Do-Follow

You can add your do-follow blog to this list.

There is a list of more plugins as well as directories you can add your do-follow blog to. Check it out.

  • http://www.tucsonseosolutions.com Tucson SEO Solutions

    Hi Erum,

    I will gladely add you to our Do Follow List of blogs and forums that can be found at http://www.tucsonseosolutions.com/dofollowlistoflists.

    We usually update when we verify we have have done so it should appear very soon.

  • http://thedrunkblog.com/blog/ The Drunk Blog

    I agree with your post, but I am looking for a way to hard code it out without bothering with a plugin. A search for nofollow in the code would probably suffice, I just don’t feel like breaking my blog until I test it correctly.

    Also, a completely unrelated note, but have you ran across a way to display all posts in a category or by an author? Perhaps as an RSS feed or similar. You seem to know your WordPress.

  • http://www.dotsndashes.com Erum Munir

    The problem with hard coding something like that is that you have to remember to do it every time you upgrade WordPress. A plugin makes the process much simpler.

    Do you want to place the RSS feed from a certain category on another website? I know Feedburner has a widget that does just that. Perhaps only add a category/author feed and you should get the desired result. For example the feed for my ‘All Things WordPress’ category can be found at: http://www.erummunir.com/category/wordpress/feed

  • http://www.custom-research-papers.com/ mevric

    ya i gree with ya dude and thank for post

  • http://thedrunkblog.com/blog/ The Drunk Blog

    Ah, yes! Awesome, I never thought to append /feed/ to a category, it works perfect for authors as well.

    Yeah, I know the issue with upgrade, but every little plugin adds up, especially with cheapo hosting….

  • http://www.dotsndashes.com Erum Munir

    Glad I could help.

    Just make sure you keep a record of any hard coding and you should be fine.

  • http://www.dotsndashes.com Erum Munir

    Thanks for the link Tucson. For some reason Akismet thought your message was spam. I had to rescue it.

  • http://www.erummunir.com/58/how-to-get-visitors-to-leave-comments How To Get Visitors To Leave Comments? | ErumMunir.com

    [...] We have already discussed one approach and that is by making your blog do-follow. [...]

  • http://www.erummunir.com/91/generate-trackbacks-and-backlinks Generate Trackbacks and Backlinks | ErumMunir.com

    [...] wish it also had the option to detect blogs that offer trackbacks with the do-follow option. Without do-follow, the backlink is [...]

  • http://www.unlimitedwebdesigns.com Florida web design

    I don’t think nofollow is good choice to fight Comment Spam we already have comment moderation for that . Ans only google bot differentiate between no-follow and do-follow ,Yahoo and Msn still give importance to No-follow links

  • http://www.dotsndashes.com Erum Munir

    So true. Comment moderation along with the Akismet plugin and may be a Captcha plugin can take care of spam.

    Since Google is one of the most used search engines, it is best to avoid the no-follow tag IMO.

  • http://www.executive-foundation.com/ Management Mentoring

    It’s good to see someone else using dofollow links! Like Erum says, spam is an issue but it is possible to prevent this and still have dofollow links if you install the right things.

  • http://www.ledlightingsupplier.co.uk/ Robert

    Hurrah! A fellow blogger has joined the movement :)

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