From time to time, I do some blog hopping and if I find some good blogs, I try to emulate what they are doing to increase my income money from blogging . I have noticed the “U Comment I follow” sign but I never knew what that meant until lately I discovered its importance.
“U Comment I follow” basically means is that if you place a comment in a blog whcih bears such sign, the search engines will follow the links placed by the commentor resulting in a back link to the commentor’s blog.
According to some search engines (like google) they do not follow the links in the comments. A test done revealed otherwise. There are other search engines who say they treat the links like any other link. No matter what they say, I am sure it is sensible to say that disabling the “No follow” will be of mutual benefit to both the owner of the site and the commentor.
So what is this “No follow” nonsense? Well it all started out with Google. They figured out that a lot of sites has been getting back links through spam comments made on blogs. (Remember that back links help boost a sites ranking in the search engines) So in order to avoid that situation and hopefully also curb or even stop spamming, Google implemented a “no follow” policy when it comes to comments. Other search engines soon followed.
The question is, did they succeed ? Today the spamming problem has gotten worse and spammers still spam. According to Word Press founder Matt Mullenweg “In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.”
So why should you continue to allow “no-follow” after all, it has no effect after. (This is enabled by default) You are better off protecting your blog by activating spam filters. The adverse effect of “no-follow” is that it punishes the commentor with legitimate and sensible comments. As one blogger puts it so nicely, “PUNISH SPAMMERS, NOT BLOGGERS.”
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