Djarot Studio

Join The DoFollow Revolution!

Jarot, May 2, 2008 5:04 am. These past few months, me my self, witnessed a silent movement gain momentum and transform into a full-blown revolution. It's the DoFollow movement.

WordPress adds the “rel=nofollow” attribute to all links in comments, by default. And so far, most blogging software does the same thing. With the good intentions: to prevent nasty spammers from leaving spammy comments.

But in real life, it doesn’t stop comment spam in any sense really. Beside, with good moderation and thanks to the genius use of Akismet plugin, spam controlled reasonably well.
In essence, all nofollow does is: prevent link love and google juice being shared amongst your loyal readers and commentators. Not really in the spirit of things, ain't it?

So what can we conscientious bloggers do about the situation? Well luckily there are quite a few plugins that remove the nofollow command:

• DoFollow Plugin (Semiologic) - This is the one that started it all, and the one I’ve installed. Plain and simple, it removes all nofollows from comments and trackbacks.
• DoFollow (Kimmo Suominen) - This adds the ability to remove the nofollow once the comment reaches a certain age - ie after 2 days.
• Link Love - This removes the nofollow once the commenter has posted a specific number of time - ie after 5 comments.

For me, the above plugins are the best, but for your strong consideration you should, i repeat, you should, read the Andy Beard’s ultimate list of DoFollow plugins.

If this movement continues gaining momentum, I can see WordPress removing the nofollow command by default before long. Until then though, you need a way to separate your Google juice sharing, link loving blog from all the miserable non-sharing blogs out there.

The DoFollow revolution continues to gain speed, and the number of bloggers following the movement has increased from a few dozen to many hundreds (if not more). I would love to link to them all and share the link love, but I suspect you might find it a somewhat boring read. Therefore I’m listing below just a handful of DoFollow advocates I’ve come across recently:

• David Airey of Creative Design
• Dawud Miracle of Healthy Webdesign
• Brown Baron of Brown Thoughts
• Char of Essential Keystrokes
• Chris Garret of chrisg.com

The DoFollow movement is all about thanking you for contributing to my site. Another way of doing it is just saying “thanks”. So, all of you, thanks for the recent comments.

Inspired by Aaron, Milienzo.com from his words about Joining the DoFollow Revolution. You did it buddy!