What Is DoFollow and NoFollow? Guide: How to Make Blogspot Blogs Dofollow?

Dear friends, this is a blog notification post. I have decided to make my blog, DoFollow. You will find the comment policy here.

Backlinks are very important for your websites. They are like votes cast by one respectable website to another, and they will greatly increase the site’s traffic. When one gets many backlinks, one’s site’s ranking in search engine results will skyrocket. Search engines use programs called search bots or web crawlers to access and index web pages. That’s how you see websites in the search results of Google and Yahoo!.

If your site ranks high for any search terms related to the products you promote, you can get several potential customers (a very daunting task indeed). Now, in order for you to get business, you must rank high in search engines, and the most important thing that will help you in this is link building.

You should try to get links from whichever sources available. It is a tactic in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In the past, when you commented in a blog, you could get a backlink, just by using this HTML code:

<a href="your link URL">your link name (anchor)</a>

When you placed this piece of code within your comment, you used to get backlink from it. It was highly beneficial for you to rank high (especially if the blog is high PageRank).

What is NoFollow?

Soon the scenario changed. In 2005, Matt Cutts, Google’s webspam team head and Jason Shellon of Blogger brought up a new attribute in HTML codes—NOFOLLOW. Nofollow is a HTML tag added to the link anchor code, and will change the normal code as:

<a href=”your link URL” rel=”nofollow”>your link name</a>

This is automatically done. Meaning, when you comment with the link, the NoFollow attribute will be added automatically. And the result is deep. The link will be valueless and the search crawlers would not follow them to index. So, such a link is as useless as a piece of text. Blogger blogs soon adopted this and being Google’s regulation, all or most of other search engines also adopted this.

Though this is a good scheme to prevent comment spamming, it hit the genuine commenters. They also lost so many backlinks, and a nice easy way to get them. But people started working against this. The bloggers started removing NoFollow attribute from the comments of valuable commenters. And a different attribute, DoFollow began.

Many bloggers followed suit. Today there are so many DoFollow blogs, and by commenting on these blogs, with your backlink, you can get full value on that link. You can use such blogs and comment links in them to promote your own site in search results. Soon enough, so many DoFollow search engines also started coming, which index only DoFollow blogs. You can search for a particular term, and get the related DoFollow blogs.

A DoFollow comment will be a normal comment as in the above or will have the attribute “rel=’dofollow’” instead of nofollow, as in:

<a href=”link URL” rel=”dofollow”>link name</a>

The attribute DoFollow or no rel attribute at all means the blog link is good. Though no attribute in HTML exists as DoFollow, it means that the blog is not NoFollow, so it has the same effect of a normal backlink.

How to Make Your Blogger Blog DoFollow?

Before doing these steps, you should allow anonymous comments by going to Settings in Blogger and then Comments. You may enable or disable the moderation. You will soon know the importance of moderation, however. Here are the steps to make comments DoFollow:

1. Go to Blogger layout (in new Blogger) and click Edit HTML.

2. Check Expand Widget Templates.

3. Search for ‘NoFollow.’ You will find at least two of them in the code.

4. Remove “rel=”nofollow”” from the tag that starts with “<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl'”

5. The second nofollow attribute is for pingback/trackback URLs (blogs that link to your post and ping it). You may or may not retain these URLs. It’s completely optional.

6. That’s it! Enjoy. Your comment’s title is now ‘DoFollow.’

In old Blogger, you can do this by editing HTML in Template tab.

By doing this in Blogger, the comment title will be made DoFollow. But the backlinks will be available only if you comment with Name and URL field enabled. The comment body links will still remain NoFollow. So, you needn’t place any link in the body, just place the required anchor text in the name field, and URL in the URL filed and comment; it will become a DoFollow backlink to your URL.

How to Make WordPress Blogs DoFollow?

As I have no idea of WordPress blogs, and have never worked with them, I am not sure if this helps or not. But you can make the WordPress blogs or self-hosted WordPress blogs DoFollow by using a simple plug-in here.