Posted December 5th, 2007
by admin
When Google Inc. spearheaded the fight against comment spams in 2005, it received immediate and wide acceptance from different websites, especially from bloggers who were sick and tired of deleting spam after spam after spam of useless comments on their blogs.
It is meant to solve a major drawback to receiving comment spams, by discouraging spammers from leaving a comment because search engines will ignore the link anyway.
In so doing however, it also discourages readers from commenting because they too are being ignored by search engines! It thus creates a dead link between a blogger and its readers who leave legitimate comments to the site. This ‘flaw’ takes away the camaraderie and sense of community between bloggers and readers as the rel=”nofollow” tag takes away any incentive of commenting to a post. © 2007
Posted December 5th, 2007
by admin
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
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