Are You Following Me?

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If I place a link to your website on my blog there is a chance someone will click on it and you will gain a free visitor to your site.

If you make a comment on my blog your name will be hyperlinked to your site and you have another chance to grab some free visitors.

If you trackback to one of my posts from your own blog and I approve, you get yet another link back to your site. These are all ways to generate traffic to your site by interacting with mine.

Now generating traffic is all well and good but you also want your comments to help your site’s ranking in the search engines and doing the things above does not guarantee this at all. Why?

Do you follow?
WordPress software by default adds the “nofollow” HTML attribute to all links from user generated content on your blog. This means anyone leaving a comment or providing a trackback to your site will not gain any positive influence when it comes to ranking in the search engines.

Put simply, if you leave a comment on a Wordpress blog that has default settings you will not rank any higher in the search engines. Sure you might get some traffic from people clicking on your links but you want to gain some extra ranking benefit too.

How can I know the difference?
A quick way to tell if the blog you are visiting has the “nofollow” attribute in place is to click any post that has comments and view the source code:

• FireFox: Right-click the page then “View Page Source”
• Internet Explorer: Right-click the page then “View Source.”

Scroll down to find the code for the comment section and if you see rel=’external nofollow’ after the links then you know you will not be credited when the search bots crawl that particular site.

How can I change my own blog settings?
There are 2 main methods you can use.

1. Use a plugin
2. Modify the core WordPress code

The main problem I have with modifying the WordPress code is you have to remember not to overwrite it when you upgrade to the latest version of the WordPress software or update the new version once you have upgraded.

Dan Thompson (One of my fellow moderators over at Lee McIntyre’s Standing Start Profits) recently made a post about this:
http://www.elpassoblog.com/why-adding-blog-comments-does-nothing-for-seo/

It was Dan that got me thinking about this issue in more depth recently. As I mentioned on his blog I’ve tried many different methods but in the last few days I’ve settled on using Semiologic’s DoFollow plugin which you can download here (bottom of the page):

Semiologic DoFollow Plugin

Install like you would any other plugin and once activated the “nofollow” code is removed from your comment section.

Being the proud owner of a “dofollow” blog has it’s own issues and there are a couple of things you need to consider before you put this in place - primarily spam.

I will be talking about this in more detail soon and how this has caused me to rethink certain aspects of my blog’s comment policy. See you then.