That’s right, we’ve done our research and we realize that do-follow blogs are a target for bored spammers and internet marketers, but we recommend a ton of other sites and services out there, so it’s only right that Google should recognize those recommendations.
In case you’re not familiar with the term do-follow, I’ll try to give it an extreme layman’s explanation. When you comment on some blogs, you’re able to include your site’s url. When people read the comments on a blog, they can click on your name and be taken to your blog. This is great for increasing your blog’s popularity, but not your blog’s Page Rank. Page Rank was developed by Sergey and Larry over at Google, and it’s basically where your site ranks on any search results. Ideally to get the most traffic you’ll want to appear in the top of the Google searches about your niche, and the sites with the highest Page Rank appear first.
How do you get a higher Page Rank? Well one of the best ways to increase your Page Rank is to have other sites link to your site, and the better the linking page’s Page Rank, the more “highly recommended” your blog appears to be in the eyes of Google. If the linking page has their settings set to “no-follow” that means that Google will not recognize the link as a recommendation, and therefore will not increase your blog’s Page Rank. Most blog programs default to no-follow so you have to change your blog to do-follow. For WordPress, you can install the plugin below.
So by changing LA Snark to a do-follow blog, we’re hoping that everyone we link to will benefit from being mentioned and recommended by our site. If you comment on any of the posts on LA Snark, you will be given a do-follow link back to your site, meaning that in the eyes of Google, LA Snark recommends you.
I encourage everyone in the blogosphere to keep the blogging world friendly. You can download the Do-Follow plugin for WordPress here.
Now what we’d like to do is have everyone comment below with a link back (in the url field) to your do-follow blog. Let’s keep the blog community growing!
on Jul 16th, 2008
Just added the follow to my new site
on Aug 24th, 2008
Great choice!