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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