Mad Dozza’s Blog

For anyone that doesnt know what on earth the title of this entry refers to, here is a little explanation:

The main factor in a website getting listed high on search engines is the amount of links that are pointing back to their site from other sites (there are other factors like the relevance and strength of the link which are also important, but that is beyond the scope of this post). By default Wordpress, which is used to create most blogs on the internet, has a small bit of code added to external links such as comments. The code is rel=”nofollow” which tells search engines not to record the link, so if you are 100′th on Google for a search term of “ice cream” then having 1000 links to your site all with the “nofollow” code in them will not benefit your search engine position. Having 1000 links without the “nofollow” code in the links will boost you way above 100th.

Why does this matter for blogs?

The idea of blogs having “nofollow” code on their links was initially so spammers would not bother posting spam to the blog as it would not benefit the search engine rankings of the spammers site. Unfortunately as a bi-product of this, genuine commenters are not rewarded for their time with a search-engine-rank boosting link.

There is major debate as which option is the best, personally i feel that the amount of spam does not increase greatly when not having the “nofollow” code (which is refered to as “dofollow”). Therefore i have decided that all comments on these blogs will be “dofollow” links, rewarding you for the time and effort of posting comments to this blog.

I have joined the “dofollow” movement called “i-follow” run by Randa Clay Visit their site for more details.