What is a ‘do follow blog’ anyway?
A Blog that follows is a blog designed to not implement the link attribute rel=”nofollow”. What this means that when the different search engines spider your site, they find the links on your site and crawl (follow) them to their destination. This is a piece of a more complicated system that was created to assign web pages a rank which in turn was meant to help position these sites when a person performs a search, mostly with regard to Google searches.
Let’s briefly examine how this works. You leave a comment on this blog for example. When Google spiders this blog, it picks up your link and gives it what is usually referred to as a “vote”. Basically what is meant by this is that Google interprets the link found here as a sign that this site referenced another. This increases the “popularity” or “power” of the referenced site. This was a simple analogy for how a link can help your site.
Do all blogs follow links on their pages?
Actually almost all blogs do not follow links on their pages. The reason behind this stems from the fact that most of us use a template engine, CMS, or blog provider to get our blogs on the net. The most common blogs are probably found using blogger.com or Wordpress.com, even this blog uses Wordpress. By default blogs set links not to be followed, especially comment links. You need to go out of your way a bit to enable following links.
My 2 Cents On No Follow :
No follow links were meant to save us all from spammers! In my opinion, if that was the goal of no follow, it failed miserably. Have you noticed less spam? I know I sure haven’t. As a matter of fact with the increasing number of sites that use no follow for their links, it encourages those same spammers to work only that much harder and to visit that many more websites to obtain the links they were after. Years ago someone going “link hunting” may have only had to surf 100 websites today to get the links he wanted. Now this same spammer may scan 200 or 300 sites in the same day in an effort to achieve the same result as before. In addition to this, since many people have taken solace in their new found “no follow security system” that more spam comments get approved than before. What’s the difference? It’s no follow isn’t it? Sure is! So now spammers can fill our sites with ridiculous off topic comment links for the sole purpose of someone actually clicking on it! This strategy made since when the web was young, now it is more of a numbers game. You get 50,000 no follow links and you are bound to get some traffic from that aren’t you? That’s what the spammers are saying, no doubt.
In any case, I think the real moral of the story for myself is that no follow links not only do not work for their intended purpose but have given those who would use every opportunity to take advantage of the “system” a new handy dandy tool to manipulate their web site.
I believe links should be shared! At the end of the day, if we all shared links, all of our web sites would be in a better position. Linking is good! Let’s not all get our knickers in a bind over some spilled page rank that wasn’t helping you anyway! See that web site that is ranked above yours in Google with half your page rank? Scratch your head over that the next time you are worried about outbound links ruining your serps!
Do you have a follow blog?
If you have a follow blog, let us know! Drop us a line with a link to your follow blog. If you’re blog is “G” rated and you add me to your blogroll, make sure you let me know so I can return the favor! Let’s share! Sharing is good! 
Sometimes those of us who allow links to be added to the content of our sites like to set forth a few simple rules of acquisition for these links. If this is the case, please let us know any rules you would like others to abide by when commenting on your “do follow blog”.
As for myself.
Just 1 Rule …
No Spam! - Say something for real! Leave a useful or insightful comment and you are sure to be approved!
