Finally... "U Comment, I Follow"

Finally, I took a little time to update the code on my site so "I Follow" when "U Comment."

Thanks are due to several people:

• Andy Beard and Dawud Miracle for leading the charge on this issue
• Randa Clay Design for the neat graphic
• Mike Sansone for publishing how-to instructions in TypePad
• Kimmo Suominen for instructions about how to install a plugin in WordPress

And I took the time to join the No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community at Bumpzee! established and managed by Andy Beard.

Do you follow?

Update: 6-25-08
I need to take a look at this issue again. There have been some comments that I really don't follow and if that's true it's totally unintentional.  Thanks for your input. Feel free to leave relevant links that could help me.

Comments

[Steve Roesler]

Hey, Sandy, this little post is a helpful reminder.

I had started to pursue this using Mike's instructions and got sidetracked with, uh, work! (Can you imagine?)

Back to the Typepad code...

[Sandra Renshaw]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for stopping by! Glad my post helped. I need those reminders, too. There's many things I want to get done on my own site!

Sandy

[Kyle Eslick]

I don't follow on my site :)

Google tends to frown on this practice and penalize sites that use it. That won't effect some people, but 90% of my traffic comes from Google!

It also is believed to have some SEO ramifications by many as the incoming links should be equal or greater to outgoing links.

I guess I would say there is a reason all the major blogging services add rel=nofollow ;)

[Andy Beard]

Kyle the trick is to have lots of internal linkage on your single pages, and to be careful in other areas such as your duplicate content pages.
The simple solution for most blogs is to just add some related posts

the majority of blogs I visit with dofollow I can normally spot ways they are wasting google juice and reduce the number of useless external links they have on a page, to counterbalance things.

Lots of major forums do extremely well in search results, and have followable sigs and links in posts.
I know a lot of very prominent PR7+ blogs that are dofollow, some of them also appear in the WP Console, and plenty are well noted SEOs.

Nofollow was introduced because of comment spam, not for blogs to horde pagerank.

Welcome to the bumpzee community Sandy - don't forget to add the "bump" button.

One of the good things about Bumpzee is how much link love it shares back to the community members.

[Absinthe]

"Google tends to frown on this practice and penalize sites that use it."

No offense Kyle, but this is simply not true. This misconception comes from too many webmasters becoming obsessed with the idea of leaking "Google Juice" (PageRank), when PageRank itself is simply an estimate of a web site's strength.

As long as you are writing quality content, your blog is going to receive a steady stream of incoming links, which is what Google actually looks for (natural links). IMO, DoFollow is a simple and effective way to show your readers that you appreciate them taking the time to not only visit but also comment on your blog ;)

[Ike]

I just like the idea of rewarding good community behavior. I was never a fan of "blogroll politics", it was a contrived form of "link-love."

Pretty soon, there is going to be a vast shift in the way web traffic is measured, because so much content is now pushed through feeds. Why not reward someone who takes the time to come directly to a site to participate?

[Blogger Blog Tips]

This is nice from you, I might start the same!

[Turismo]

Hello Sandy, exist there any option to stop bad comments, comments that are made just to get the link ?

[angie]

I will try to implement dofollow as soon as possible on my site.

[Daniel Oliveira]

good idea!! im from Brazil and i have a tech blog - http://torradeira.net and im IN

[Bape]

Its ironic that many bloggers talk about this but then they actually use no follow.

[lunikoff]

lunikoff street here

[FreeStoring]

hay!!
good project :)
senks :)

[soyunloco]

I think this is a good project however some people take advantage of these blogs by just posting nonsense things that can be easy recognize as spam just so they can get a backlink and better ranking for their site.

[music]

very interesting.
i'm adding in RSS Reader

[music]

What do you mean ?

[radio valley]

I will run this soon on my blog too.
Hope google doesn't really penalize us.

[bhutanese music]

Soyunloco, yes you are right. People will post nonsense things just to get a backlink.
However the blog owner should moderate the comments to disencourage nonsense comments posting.

[Vinicius]

Very good idea! i'm thinking in a project with this info

[Simlock vrij maken]

I need to use this pictures too on my blog. I don't like nofollow-links. They are so ugly!

[Virtual Office]

backlinks do only 2 things: the higher the pr is on the page you have a backlink, the sooner google will crawl your page; helps improving rankings on certain keywords in serps. that's all.

[Luciano]

I've been thinking about this do-follow movement and how it may change certain dynamics of participating blogs. I've been digging for answers and I'm seeing that many blog publishers are throwing in the towel on the dofollow comment policy - frustrated with spammers. Others have become comment nazis, yet others are putting more brainpower into how to preserve the integrity of their comments/commentators. There are some obvious problems with spammers. I have problems too, but since I've always moderated every comment or url submission personally - its nothing different for me.

[MSN hacken]

Yes, but that is the importance about it Virtual office.

[free playstation 3]

What does nofollow do? i still don't understand its purpose.

[George Lindemann Jr]

Glad to have another dofollow blog to visit!:-)

Your blog is already doing so well so this would be more of a "thank you" to your readers, I guess.