For quite a few of my readers, just saying, “Xtra Cheezhead is a DoFollow site” will be enough. For the rest, here’s a quick explanation:
Search engine rankings and trust are largely due in part to the sites that link to you. Blogs, which offer easy ways to submit backlinks to your own site via comments, for example, originally opened up a can of worms for bloggers who became inundated with comment spam.
To fight comment spam, a NoFollow tag was implemented by blogging software which basically told a search engine spider, “Don’t count this link.” It’s debatable whether or not it decreased the amount of spam, but I believe it may have hurt blogs – particularly new blogs – from getting interaction and publicity from the community.
To see if I’m right, I’ve made Xtra Cheezhead a DoFollow blog. In short, this means that comments left with a URL attached to the commenter will receive some search engine love for their time and energy. In addition, blogging about an Xtra post from your own blog will result in a link to your post via a trackback.
Really short: Comment on Xtra posts and link to posts from your own blog.
A few caveats: 1. It will take 3 days for your link to count. This gives me enough time to weed out any spam. 2. I reserve the right to delete or edit a comment for any reason. Leaving something like “Nice blog!” is the mating call of the Delete button. And 3. I reserve the right to go back to being a NoFollow site or adjusting the current option in case spam gets out of hand. I don’t want to do this, but spam does happens and ruins a good party every now and then.
Popularity: 3% [?]
September 28th, 2007 at 3:09 am
Its ironic that many bloggers talk about this but then they actually use no follow.
September 28th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Please do something that almost no one with a dofollow blog ever does. Around the holidays, when your blog has been dofollow for about 90 days, do a follow up article and talk about the impact dofollow had on traffic and comments vs the unpleasant side of dealing with spammy/junk comments.
Thanks
November 21st, 2007 at 6:55 am
Its a nice concept, but it also leads to increased ’spam’ with comments like ‘Good Job’ or ‘Nice blog’ that are not actually relevant to the post, but are just there because the poster saw a ‘DoFollow’ badge on the blog and wanted a backlink.
I suppose you could call this a double edged sword, it’d definitely get your more comments, but also increase your moderation work.
September 12th, 2009 at 6:28 am
really great post! seriously i dont know the concept of followers and following,after reading your blog post it will help me a lot !