DoFollow
February 16, 2007 | Links
Having read this last night, and now this and this, I have decided that I agree entirely and have added the dofollow plugin to both Binary Moon and Binary Joy.
What does this mean for you? For most people it means nothing, but if you have a website, you will now get some link juice from Google when you comment and supply your site url.
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February 16, 2007
I started using the Dofollow a long time ago. As long as my spam filters (Akismet, SK2, Bad Behaviour) keep the junk out, then I don’t mind my commenters getting Google juice.
February 16, 2007
That’s exactly what I’m thinking. When I first heard about nofollow I was dubious, and it has certainly not changed anything regarding the amount of spam I get. I stop everything with my Akismet, ad Behaviour combo so I see no reason to use it.
February 23, 2007
Agree entirely. In fact I’ve just installed DoFollow a few minutes ago!
May 22, 2007
hi there,
congratulations on dofollow! I believe nofollow kills the relationships between bloggers. Blogging should be personal and when you write something about someone, that person should get credit!
BTW, I made a search on google for “site:binarymoon.co.uk *** -view”, you have 77 supplemental pages. I suggest you add more content to those pages and add disallow: /wp
to your robots.txt since your wp-login page is indexed.
May 25, 2007
Nice one, I too have embraced DoFollow - NoFollow just doesn’t stop spam the way some crazy thought it might.
May 30, 2007
I’m a do follower! After all, blogging is all about social networking to some extent.
June 13, 2007
Glad to see others joining the movement.
June 20, 2007
i just join the dofollow movement…. its a gret plugin
July 9, 2007
When I still see rel=’external’ …. doesn’t this mean that Google will NOT give the commenter any link juice ?
July 9, 2007
Sorry I forgot to mention that I am also a do follower BTW.
July 27, 2007
It’s a great move, i don’t believe in the Nofollow tag. All it boils down to really is not passing Pagerank to a specific URL, and Pagerank is something i don’t give two hoots about. It’s a meaningless value awarded by Google to give an “indication” of volume and quality of links. Matt Cutts of Google was more or less the inventor of the Nofollow attribute.
In all honesty i wish Google would just scrap the whole visible Pagerank thing and just use it internally if they really must.
Ben here is a big big tip. If you go to Google type:
site:www.binarymoon.co.uk
You will see every single page of your site has an identical description of:
“jump to navigation. Try Firefox - it’s faster, and more secure than internet explorer. It even has a cute little mascot.”
This is because you don’t have a Meta Description tag defined, so Google is just grabbing the first thing on the page to display in the index as a description of the page.
I strongly advise you to get a Meta Description plugin and it will boost click throughs from search queries dramatically.
If i done a search for say “Ratatouille Review” and your result has that description about Firefox i can assure you the user will most likely click one of the other 9 sites on the Google page.
Do a Google search for “Wordpress Meta Description Plugin” and there’s a few excellent ones to choose from that will automatically generate unique content relevant descriptions automatically for you and they are a sinch to install.
Hope this helps, Carly.
July 27, 2007
Hi Carly - thanks for the comments.
Whilst I agree that it’s something I should do this (I used to have a plugin do it for me, but it messed up the caching plugin I was using), I don’t think it’s that big an issue. I am actually on the second page of Google for Ratatouille review, and the description is taken from the content of the page containing the search words.
July 27, 2007
Your right Ben.
I just searched some titles for you other entries, and sure as eggs it’s actually pulling entry content and not the replicated pice of text in the header like what occurs if you do a site: search.
Hmm, that’s interesting.. It must be to do with your pages not being cached with the “noarchive” tag your using.
You learn something new every day. I’ve never really used the noarchive tag, but it looks like Google is pulling content for a keyword search but the Firefox text on a site site.
Thanks for pointing that out, i’ll have to look in to the noarchive tag a bit more… and it looks like you don’t really need a Description tag after all.
Carly,
July 28, 2007
Carly,
Your observations are really good about the text showing up in google search.
Ben,
I am beginning to think how difficult would it be for Google to still discount the links appearing in the comments, despite that people like us are not using the no-follow. The reason behind this thought is that Google is all link vote system is all about what the author recommends. A link in the comments section is really not worth more then the links appearing in the blog post.
Now Google already has alog in place to find which links are part of the grand scheme of the site, e.g. those that appear n every page like a blog roll. It should not be too hard for them to find the links in the coments area and then not giving these links as much weight as it gives in-post link.
Any comments ?
August 6, 2007
I’m pretty sure google can tell the difference between posts, and comments. I am sure they give links inside an actual post more weight than comments, but with DoFollow enabled, there is still alot more link juice than with NoFollow. If you want to do a search of blogs that have doFollow, check out my DoFollow Keyword Search Tool by clicking on the signature.
September 6, 2007
Thanks Ben for the link to DoFollow. I did not know WP had a default of nofollow until I read it here.
September 14, 2007
Nice initiative ben. I follow binary moon since you release your first theme for wordpress! Thanks for the dofollow link.
September 28, 2007
Its ironic that many bloggers talk about this but then they actually use no follow.
October 4, 2007
I do-follow links now on my Aussie housewife blog. After a long time procrastinating I have seen the importance of dofollow and using the “do follow” principal to help keep the Internet better connected. http://www.reallyreally.net - Take a look at my dofollow blog and feel free to comment. Thank you, Regards Bree.
October 16, 2007
Ben I remember when binarymoon was your game protfolio. I guess it’s been awhile.
Thanks for the dofollow info and I have joined in the spreading of the juice.
October 16, 2007
This is great news. I am in the process of making my site into a dofollow also to help share the love
November 11, 2007
Good and really useful post for all readers and specially for me, thanks!
November 12, 2007
Havent you turned that back to off ..
I checked the your code .. and I see the nofollow attribute. Is that because you are using a delayed DoFollow ?
November 12, 2007
I haven’t turned them off. I had enough of people commenting solely for the page rank gains so now use dofollow only if you have X good comments.
November 21, 2007
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.
November 21, 2007
I don’t get many “good job” comments. It takes me maybe 5 minutes a day to moderate what I do get.
I’m quite happy with my current setup, not much I need to change I think
December 9, 2007
Im half and half with the dofollow movement, Its fair enough to give a bit to your readers don’t you think?
January 26, 2008
I read on another blog of an addition to the doFollow pluggin, where you only get link juice if you link to the blog post in your own blog - ‘U Trackback, I follow’. This is a pluggin, but I dont entirely agree with it, so I’ve just installed the DoFollow pluggin and se how it goes!
April 3, 2008
I think it is a great idea to add the dofollow function as provides a great service for the readers. Have impleted it also into my blogs
April 27, 2008
I’ve download it long time ago..
But did not know what te function of that little thing…
But, now I’m donloading it again and install it to my website.
May 24, 2008
your blog comments are still nofollow
May 25, 2008
Akshay - you’re wrong. I do indeed use dofollow - but only for regular commenters.
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