I was reading a post on Andy Beard’s blog today, and was reminded of the ‘dofollow’ movement.

What this involves is removing the default WordPress ‘nofollow’ tag from comments.

A few years ago, search engines were getting inundated: spammers would leave comments on blogs, and these links would be counted like any other link towards a site’s rankings.

However, unlike a link that everyone evaluates and approves (such as the decision you might make to add a link to your Blogroll), these links were often unwanted and usually unsupervised. On many blogs, spammers got as much benefit from commenting on an older post as a newer one, so they could add to an old and forgotten post, and have the comment stick around until the owner did a deep clean (which in some cases NEVER happened).

So the search engines suggested the ‘nofollow’ tag. This bit of code was added to the <a> HTML links tag to indicate they were considered ‘outside’ the jurisdiction of the blog, and unapproved. The result was this:

<a href="http://egwebsite.com" rel="nofollow">spammy link</a> 

This made the search engines happy, but actually went against the spirit of the whole comment issue – after all, on a well-maintained blog, comments ARE approved, or kicked off. And the links of good comments shouldn’t be penalized (in the dofollow jargon, it’s called ‘sharing the link love’).

Note I say well maintained; if the blog is running wild and untended, then the nofollow entry makes life a little easier by removing some of the incentive to link spam.

Of course, the there are many discussions online about the pros and cons, and many reasons offered to use nofollow – and not to. I plan to explore the topic in more detail in the next ActiveBlogging Report, but if you’re thinking of ‘sharing the link love’, then consider one of the plugins Andy suggested, and ‘dofollow’!