As a longtime supporter of the “do follow” movement, it is really hard for me to do this - going back to “nofollow”. This is certainly not the way that I ever think, but there comes a time when person has to say “enough”. If you are fuzzy about “do follow” and “nofollow”, feel free to read my explanation below.
What is “nofollow”?
Google designed the rel=nofollow hyperlink attribute back in 2005 to prevent the “larry page rank” or PageRank from being passed from link to link. WordPress was modified to include this feature in comment posts shortly after that.
The author links as well as any links embedded in the comment content would be automatically “nofollowed” and Google was very happy because its PageRank will not be exploited.
What is “do follow”?
I’m not sure who started the movement, I’m guessing it has been started before the existence of this blog. “Do follow” is a movement that try to pass the PageRank to other website from link to link. A lot of plugin have been created for the purpose of disabling the rel=nofollow. I’ve only use one of them.
This movement was enormous though they knew that this act will lead to major casualty for their blog/site - loosing PR.
Reason for going back to “nofollow”..
I have my own strong reason why I leave this movement and went back to what Google desire. Despite my reason, it is really hard for me to leave the movement. I like helping potential blogs, expose them and help them build PageRank. But when thinking of my problem, it is better for me to pull-out from the movement. The problem I have is the same problem that majority of blog owners were force to face - Comment spammers.
Those comments posted by them were not intended for the purpose of discussion but more to taking advantage of my “do follow” movement. Although I’ve not been very decisive about it, I’ve been watching about how this situation branch out. For the past few months, I’ve been spending more time filtering and checking comments than writing which is not good for the health of this blog.
I have to admit that “do follow” has helped me increase total comments that I got for each posts. I am prepare if those numbers diminish, I would rather have a few good comments that specially made to contribute to the discussion.
Are you still do follow?
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