Saturday 14 July 2007

You Comment, I Follow

You may have noticed the 'Ucomment, IFollow' banners in variuous forms on various blogs and wondered what all the fuss was about. I ignored this for a long time, but I think that it's right that the 'no follow' tag should be removed from blog templates.
Why? It allows a proper link to those who leave you a comment. I comment to get links (not spam comments but meaningful ones) and I would hope that where I leave my comments, the 'no follow' tag has been removed.
How? You can get 'do follow' plug-ins for Wordpress and Blogspotters can edit their HTML and remove the tag themselves. (more on this if needed)
It is only right to add a note of caution, it is possible that spam commenting may result, and you are encouraged either to use validation or moderated commenting so that you don't become a victim of this type of activity. Moderated is probably the safest way to go, I chose validated so that my visitors could see their comments on my site straight away..
I even made my own banner for the UCOMMENT/IFOLLOW movement which is largely based on others that I have seen.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I also use the do-follow on my blog so if you are interested, check it out and read up, leave a comment and enjoy. i agree with you, I don't do this for spam. I do howerever, comment at every blog that I visit. I think that it is appropriate to comment on things that you like and the things that you don't like. It let's the blogger know that people are reading and what they like and don't like.

jay said...

I agree wholeheartedly, I am pleased to get new comments and I reply to pretty much all of them..

barbi bharadwaj said...

Hi,

Everybody loves links. Even the google bot, but it does not like non- genuine links.

For instance, some time ago, google had a controversy over following paid links.

Now for a spider or a crawler to identify the paid links from non-paid is almost impossible.

But in most CMS , including wordpress and blogspot, it is very easy to identify comments from content. The algothirm to detect comments as links is quite easy.

do - follow may go void, if google thinks so. So do you think , it is worth all these?

But still, it does good in the short term..

jay said...

I appreciate what you say - removing 'no follow' is more of a courtesy action. If Google decide to ignore the links there is nothing that can be done about it - but the blogger can at least have the courtesy to remove the 'no follow' to give maximum impact to any ranking system that might take the link into account.
I would favour the links being allowed to stand, and the blogger to 'police' the links removing any spam that they find. Google will make up it's own mind...

hotdogman said...

How do you remove "no follow" from the blogger template?

jay said...

Hey Hot dog - I should have gone into more detail (I know you have worked it out now though) I think it was just a case of going into the template and doing a find and delete... (looking for 'nofollow')