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Posted in How-To | backlinks Blogger comments do-follow How-To I-follow nofollow
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The do-follow (I-follow) movement consists of bloggers, who have removed the (automatic) nofollow tags from comments on their blogs. This tutorial shows how to do it with your blog, so you too can belong to the movement.
The main idea behind do-follow is to reward commenters with backlinks. No-follow was added to combat comment spam, so making your blog do-follow may increase spam. My blog is do-follow, and there has been some spam, but not too much. If you find you get a lot of spam you may opt to moderate all comments.
Where to Begin
If you have a Blogger blog, the rest of the guide is for you. If, on the other hand, you have a Wordpress blog, you should check out Lucia’s Linky Love, a plugin which does the same for you. For other types of blogs, I’m sorry to say I can’t help you; try a google search.
First go to Blogger Dashboard, and edit your template HTML. Check ‘Expand Widget Templates’. Use the Find in This Page feature of your browser (Ctrl+F on Firefox), and search for rel=’nofollow’. There should be two matches. If you can’t search from your browser, copy the whole template into Notepad, and edit it there.
The first one is in the anchor tag <a expr:href=’data:backlink.url’ rel=’nofollow’> Deleting the rel=’nofollow’ from here will make backlinks give link love. I don’t think it increases linking to me, but I’ve chosen to remove it. All links to my posts (not the front page) will get a link back, when Google notices them.
The second match is <a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’ rel=’nofollow’> Removing rel=’nofollow’ from here will make comments do-follow, which was the purpose of this guide. So just remove it, and save your template.
Show You’re a Part of the Movement
Now that you have joined the movement, you might want to show it to your readers. There are some logos you can use at Randa Clay Design. I’ve decided not to clutter my sidebar any further, so I just added a note above the comment form. You can do that by going to the “Comments” tab in your blog settings, and editing the Comment Form Message.
by Sutocu | August 24, 2007 
Wow! Sutocu, this was beautiful. Good info, i have a few blogger blogs i will try and make them “do follow” through this tutorial. And for my main blog (groovy vegetarian) which is a wordpress blog, i am gonna check out that plug-in you mentioned.
I am going to post this over at Blog Catalog, for folks who might need this. Good job!
Missy.
I have noticed a growing trend toward going do-follow. But one of the major downsides bloggers are complaining about is people spamming and commenting too much and detracting from the overall quality of a blog just for some link love.
Thank you, Missy. I hope it helps.
Shaun Carter,
I know that it may increase the amount of spam, but I don’t think that’s a real problem. A blogger, who gets little traffic will have no problem moderating comments, while a high traffic blog will get its share of spam, whether or not it’s do-follow.
I wish we had some spam filters for Blogger, like there are for Wordpress, but unfortunately that’s not the case.
[…] - By using a dofollow plugin you give every commentator a link back by removing the nofollow relationship from the […]
yay for do-follow blogs!!!