What is “Do Follow”?

Do Follow is an action or a step a blogger initiates to remove the attribute rel=”nofollow” in its blog codes, either by installing a plug-in: Wordpress plugin or this Wordpress plugin, or manually for blogspot and for movable type. Most bloggers would refer to it as a campaign or a movement against rel=”nofollow”. The earliest initiator of the campaign is traced to Randa Clay who on her blog posted the now popular “U Comment, I Follow” design free for all to copy and place on their own blogs as long as the blog advocates Do Follow as well. (This site encourages submission of earlier campaigns to give proper and due credit.)

What is rel=”nofollow”?

rel=”nofollow” is a tag Google, Inc. formulated to prevent comment spams from being crawled by its search engine and is later on supported by other major search engines like Yahoo! and MSN search.

How does rel=”nofollow” work?

When a spammer leaves an unwanted comment on one’s blog like “Win an Apple I-pod”, “Get your free vacation packages now” or “Do you want to win 1 million dollars?” with a link to a website, the <rel=”nofollow”> tag ignores such link so that everytime a search engine updates its search ranking, that link is not included for relevance of a page. It is meant to punish spammers and hopes to deter abuse in posting unsolicited links to blog comments and any websites that accepts comments or trackbacks like guestbooks, visitor stats or referrer lists. © 2007