I do Follow, Spread the Link Love!
May 06, 2008
Category: Blogging, PageRank, SEO
Heard about the DoFollow movement yet? The one which was a quiet movement and nowadays became a full-blown revolution. Yes, that one. Joined yet? You should.
Just got invited by a friend who’ve joined earlier to this DoFollow Revolution.
NoFollow Situation
It’s all begin as an action answering the nofollow situation. Wordpress, other blogging software and most of blog provider adds the “rel=nofollow” attribute to all links in comments. That’s by default. The intentions are good - to prevent nasty spammers from leaving spammy comments.
However, it doesn’t stop comment spam in any sense really, and besides, with good moderation and effective use of plugins like Askimet, spam can be controlled reasonably well anyway.
Loren Baker have write a great article about 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck, which give us a clear point of view about how this nofollow attribute did.
And guess what, even Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg says NoFollow was a failure;
“In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.”
Be a DoFollower, Join the Movement
So what can we bloggers do about this sucky situation? Well luckily there are great plugins that remove the nofollow command:
- DoFollow Plugin (Semiologic) - This is the one that started it all, and the one I’ve installed. Plain and simple, it removes all nofollows from comments and trackbacks.
- DoFollow (Kimmo Suominen) - This adds the ability to remove the nofollow once the comment reaches a certain age - ie after 2 days.
- Link Love - This removes the nofollow once the commenter has posted a specific number of time - ie after 5 comments.
Those above plugins are the best, but for your strong consideration, you should check out the Andy Beard’s ultimate list of DoFollow plugins.
He wrote lists of Wordpress plugins to remove the nofollow attribute from your self-hosted wordpress blog.
Put the Badge on, Let them Know You Follow
You sure need to let people know you follow. It’s the next important part in this revolution after removing the nofollow attribute.
1. Firtsly, Randa Clay initiated this I Follow badges. Which sort of became an official badge for this DoFollow movement.
2. If you need something smaller, then Asgeir Hoem has created his own set of badges also available in various color combinations.
3. Newly added, as far as I remember, Djarot Studio was launched another new sets of DoFollow Badges. Kinda shiny lookie badges. Which also available in various color combinations, to match your own site’s style. A one pack badges, all colors inlcluded, available for downloads as 1 zip file from Djarot Studio. As y’all can see, I use the red one.
Thanking you.
The DoFollow revolution continues to gain speed, and the number of bloggers following the movement has increased from a few dozen to many hundreds. I would love to link to them all and share the link love.
And lastly,
The DoFollow movement is all about thanking you for contributing to my site. Another way of doing it is just saying “thanks”. So for all of you - thanks for the recent comments.
Well? Wait no more. Act now as a DoFollower!
And let’s spread the link love all over again!
