Nicholas M Ong

U Comment I Follow Your Love Links

U Comment I Follow

Since the latest release of WordPress, bloggers have been faced with a new challenge. In an effort to combat spam, a nofollow attribute has been added to all comments and tags on the software. Tis is probably the biggest boo boo by Google till date. Why? Simply because it did not work and lead to complications in terms of pageranks. I’m pretty sure that Akismet works just fine as it is on my blog already. It’s blocking out more than 10 spam comments daily and rising.

The nofollow attribute after each comment post basically does one thing very well. It tells Google bots and other search engine bots not to follow your links. When that happens, you get no Google Juice for leaving a useful/legitimate comment on someone elses blog. Obviously, your pagerank is dramatically affected because there is no link love. That explains why two of my blogs that had a pagerank of 4 each dropped to 0 overnight.

A month ago, I started testing a couple of dofollow plugins. Generally speaking, they all do the same thing; remove the nofollow attribute. The dofollow plugin that I’m using now is by Greg Boser. There is another dofollow plugin by semilogic which seems to be in great favour by bloggers. I have not used that one and will like to hear more if you have any feedback on that.

The ‘U Comment. I Follow’ movement has been going on for awhile now. Randa Clay, one of the poster boys of this movement has a number of buttons for you to display on your blog if you want to join the movement. Having that button on your sidebar helps you let other bloggers know that you have the dofollow plugin installed.

In fact, I will like to invite feedback with regards to the different dofollow plugins available. Tell us which plugin you are using and what you think of it ie:

• what you like about it.
• what you wish it could also do

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 00:00 and is filed under ramblings and tagged with Comment, DoFollow, Google, NoFollow, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.