To Follow or Not To Follow

I’ve been reading about the “Do Follow” movement lately and it seems to be a growing trend that is getting a lot of attention and quite a bit of followers (pun intended).

Basically this movement is a reversal of opinion about adding the “rel=nofollow” tag to comments. The “rel=nofollow” tag was originally added to combat spam and is a part of most blogging platforms, including Wordpress, MovableType, Blogger, and more. The “nofollow” tag tells Google and other search engines that the link is not trusted and should not be followed and indexed by the search engine spiders and bots. However, this did very little to stop or even slow down spammers and really only hurts a blog’s loyal readers.

Comments are an important part of any blog and are what makes a blog a community. This is the reason Average Joe Blogger has joined this movement and is giving the link love back to you. What this means is that I have removed the “rel=nofollow” tag from the comments, so when you leave a comment, and specify a URL, your blog or website will get credit with the search engines, which will ultimately help improve your PageRank. A little thank you for helping to add value and relevance to the discussion.

There are several plugins available to simply disable the “rel-nofollow” tag or you can edit your files and remove these manually. I choose the Link Love Plugin because it has the option to only remove the “nofollow” tag after a reader has left a specified number or comments. This, I hope, will prevent people from commenting just to get a link and give the link love to those that really deserve it, the loyal readers. My comment threshold is currently set at 4.

For a list of other bloggers who have joined the “Do Follow” movement check out Court’s D-List. And don’t forget to pickup your “U Comment, I Follow” button here.

What’s your take on the “Do Follow” movement? Should blogs follow or nofollow?