Mifty is Joining the Do-Follow Movement (You Comment – I Follow)

After years of working in the SEO field, I have been brainwashed to think that following other people’s links is a bad thing. That’s why many of the sites that I’ve built use the no-follow link attribute. But recently, I’ve started to become influenced by the do-follow movement also known as You Comment – I Follow. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you are looking at things purely from an SEO point of view, do-follow links make no sense, but from a blogging point of view, do-follow links are the best way to foster interaction between your blog and your visitors.

For those who are unaware of do-follow and no-follow links, here is a quick overview of these two types of links. Anybody in Search Engine Optimization will tell you that the more links that you have pointing to your page, the better you will be ranked and the more traffic that you will generate. A simple way to get these important links to your site is to comment on somebody else’s blog and leave a link to your website. Leave a couple of comments here and there and all of a sudden your page is getting ranked by the big search engine. This used to cause massive spam comments on many popular blogs with people leaving random spam comments and a back link to their website. In order to stop this, the No-Follow attribute was created as a way to tell the search engines to NOT follow the link. It is an attribute that can be added to any link. The opposite of a No-Follow link is a Do-Follow link. Do-Follow links allows the search engines to follow the link and thus improve the page rank of the landing page of the link.

Many Bloggers have been using the No-Follow link as a way to fight spam comments and also control their page rank. In fact, WordPress is a No-Follow platform by default, but you can get plugins that can change this behavior for you. In the past couple of months, I’ve noticed that a growing number of bloggers are starting to once again allow comment links to be followed. The advantage of this choice is that you turn your blog into an interactive platform where users and other members can better share their ideas.

I think that the Do-Follow movement is a wonderful idea! That’s why I’m proud to say that MiftyIsBored.com is going full Do-Follow! I am going to try out the Do-Follow experiment for several months and see how things go. However, I will moderate most of the comments so please leave quality comments as opposed to one-liners.