Thursday, April 24, 2008

You Comment I Follow. Err… Actually I don’t



You should have seen this logo or similar logo in different color been display in some blogs. That’s the You Comment I Follow badge, used by bloggers to indicate that the blog is a dofollow blog.


What is dofollow and what is nofollow?

DoFollow is a term used by bloggers and website owners who removed the “rel=nofollow” tag in their external link to other site. By removing this tag, google bots and all other search engine bots, will follow through the link and pass on page rank or link juice, commonly known as google juice, to the other site. That means, when you made a comment on a dofollow blog, you will get some google juice and if it is a nofollow blog, you won’t get at all.

So, to encourage comments from readers, some blog choose to remove the nofollow tag and put up the You Comment I Follow badge. That will indicate to the readers that if you comment, google will follow and you will be rewarded with some link love.


How to Remove The NoFollow Tag?

Well, there are already a lot of posts about how to do it, simply google “how to remove nofollow”, or click on this link, will return you quite a number of answer that can help you on how to remove it.



So What Is The Issue?

Some of the blogs out there are displaying the badge but, in actual fact, they don’t follow.

Now, there are some blogs that display the badge, but, will become dofollow only when you made a certain number of comments on the blog (that can be set using some wordpress plugin). Asia'h Epperson not referring to these blogs.


Asia'h Epperson is referring to those blogs that display the You Comment I Follow badge but, in reality, there will never ever follow you.

Why?

There are a few possibilities. Most of the time is due to they upgrade the wordpress installation and in the process, they forget to turn on the plugin that helps to remove the nofollow tag. Sometimes, it might be due to new plugin is being installed and causes problem with the nofollow tag. And, most of the time, the owner might not even realized it.

Whatever the reason, Asia’h Epperson feels that it is the blog owner’s responsibility to ensure that the blog dofollow if you put up the badge. There is really no excuse if you continue to use the badge and not following through.

If you are using the You Comment I Follow badge for your blog, it is good that after every new upgrade or installation of new plugin, put in some time to check that the blog is still followed.


Don't you think so?


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