Please DoFollow Along: There’s a Good Chap!
10th July 2009
I’ve taken the risky step of installing the “DoFollow” WordPress Plugin onto this Blog as a means of encouraging more people to leave comments on my Blog Posts.
Now before I go any further it’s worth pointing out that I will be talking techie to some degree in this article but I ask you to please persevere because if you run your own Blog, you’ll find what I have to say interesting and if you use ‘Blog Commenting’ as a method of promoting your website, you’ll similarly learn something.
The NoFollow Link Attribute
As a reader, when you go to a WordPress based Blog (such as the one you’re reading now) you can, like most Blogging platforms; contribute to a post by submitting a comment about it. This comment then appears at the end of the post as a thread in a similar manner to what you’ll find on a message board or forum.
It’s one of the features that makes Blogging both interesting, interactive and therefore popular from the readers’ and writers’ perspective.
So for example if you were to submit a comment to this post, you’d fill in a few simple fields in the form at the end of it which would include your name and your website’s address and then submit the form.
Blog Commenting
When your comment is published, your name (or whatever text you enter into that field) is turned into a link to your website within the post’s comment.
Anchor Links
This type of link is called an Anchor Link. The HTML for such anchor links generally looks like this:
Anchor Text HTML
When the spider based search engines, such as Google, crawl a website in order to catalogue it; their Web Spiders or Robots search for links between pages and between websites. In that way they can travel around the web and take a view as to which are the most popular pages being visited as well as cataloging them for their databases.
By modifying the bog standard Anchor Link HTML code to include the attribute rel=”nofollow” one is able to control how Google’s indexing spider travels around a site and what pages it indexes. In effect the “nofollow” attribute stops Google’s spider from following a particular link to another page or website.
Anchor Text HTML with the noFollow Attribute
There are a number of reasons as to why a website owner would want to implement the “nofollow” attribute on a link, however I’m not going to go into the reasons why in this post, needless to say that WordPress by default, deploys the “nofollow” attribute to all Anchor Links posted as part of its blog comments.
Comment Spam
Search engine marketers know that one way, inbound links to website help build the PageRank value of the target website which in turn boosts its ranking in Google.
Unfortunately the unscrupulous web marketers also know this and as result, blogs have become targets for large volumes of pointless and often irrelevant, comments. ‘Comment Spam’ as it is known as marketers try and build the number of inbound links to a particular website.
It’s an issue of great annoyance to anyone who runs a blog.
To counteract this many of the blog software providers such as WordPress now incorporates the “nofollow” attribute automatically into the links created in their comment posts. This stops Google following a link through to its destination website and as such, contributing to its PageRank value.
Still with me?
DoFollow
So whilst I want to discourage Comment Spam as much as the next man (I’ve also installed the Askimet plugin to counteract it), I also want to encourage legitimate comments on my posts which will contribute to the PageRank value of the commentators website.
Hence the need to remove the “nofollow” attribute from WordPress’ default comment posting settings.
The DoFollow plugin from SemioLogic does this nicely.
Got a WordPress Blog yourself? Then read this useful thread and then download the Plugin for yourself.
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Tags: Blogging, Web Design
Brian Says:
This article clears up some points for me and my hobby blog about Yorkshire. I will try it along with the tips from the ‘Headline’ post.
17th July 2009
Marcos Says:
Don’t forget to put a warning to blatant spammers that comments are moderated and their posts will be deleted so they are wasting their time. Also make sure you reivew the comments you check the link outbound and make sure it’s to a site with decent pagerank (anything over 0 will be ok). Google is now also looking at outbound links and if you link to quality sites you will benefit. I.e. it’s better to link out to an ok site than to nofollow the link (which gives you no value at all).
17th July 2009