No follow or Do follow? it’s not a 50/50 toss of a coin guess.  I came accross these webmaster specific “follow” terms, not so long ago. I have since then read, researched and tested enough advice, to know the baseless crap in most. So I took a different approach and stopped seeking advice from others and went onto use my own thinking.

Here’s my thought process….

No follow tags were introduced because of the increased amount of spammers, spamming the blogs. So technically this method of using no follow tags in a blog should have stopped or reduced spam. According to my knowledge, spammers couldn’t care less. So ‘no follow’ tag wasn’t the solution for killing spam. Least account of credit I can give in favor of ‘no follow’ tags is that it stops draining out the, ever more valuable link juice which I get from backlinks from other sites.

So no follow’ does still serve the purpose of retaining the link juice in the pages. For this to be effective I’d need quality links pointing to my blog in the first place. Obvious natural way of getting one way backlinks is if readers of my blog (That’s you!) want to link to my pages from ‘do follow blogs’ or do follow websites they  own or use. In the real world this is not a practical method for link building. For sites with killer content that is highly useful, may be. But for a blog with few ramblings on some selected topics, I don’t stand a chance in hell.

I’d rather not go through sections in do follow directories looking for blogs to comment, “only” for the purpose of a link back. But I’ll be glad if I would get a backlink for making  any sort of collaboration with other sites or blogs, given the fact that my purpose is not solely for a backlink. So I thought, why not give back my readers something I’d love to have from blogs that I read too. Something valuable, just to say thank you for reading my articles or leaving a useful comment.

I want to build my readership, who would collaborate and add value to my blog with insightful comments and genuinely appreciate the content if they find it useful and  critisize vigorously when they need to. So to start with, I’m gonna make this blog a ‘do follow blog’. Yeah, that’s right. But for one reason, I run the risk of getting spammed in volumes. But hey, there is a better solution for spam now. No follow tag is not the solution for killing spammy blog comments. But the Akismet wordpress plugin is.

No more NoFollow!

In conclusion, making blog ‘do follow’ does not harm a blog or a site if the links going out are moderated regularly, along with a script or plugin like Akismet to eliminate spam. Infact, it may even attract more visitors, who would have one more reason to get involved in discussions and comments.

Obvious enough, as of now this blog has officially shifted from ‘no follow’ to a ‘do follow blog’.