Completely avoiding the double entendres that could be drawn out of being a blogger that Does Follow; I have now decided to open all comments on this blog to let their url’s not be shielded by a "link condom".  I really like the idea of people commenting on my blog and encourage anyone to do so.  To enable this I have not put any measures to prevent people posting, save akismet which has caught over 3,000 spam posts in three months.

I have decided to remove the "nofollow" that is automatically added to posts by wordpress.  If you are unfamiliar this is a property that is added to a link that tells a search engine not to give any credence to the links within.  This is supposedly to combat more spam and I feel that it is cheating the system.  There are many different people who have done research saying that these links are still taken into account and the amount of spam since this has been implemented has only increased.

I feel that this means that sites that should be recognized because of their quality are not being indexed and spammers are being rewarded.  If you have a comment on my blog - any links will be picked up by searches and recognized accordingly.

I could go into this in more detail but there are some excellent resources online mentioning what nofollow means and the damage it is doing; please see the sites below;

• http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/ultimate-list-of-dofollow-plugins-banish-nofollow-from-comments-and-trackbacks.html
• http://courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/13-reasons-why-nofollow-tags-suck/4410/
• http://www.bumpzee.com/no-nofollow/
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Nofollow

I encourage you if you have your own blog to do the right thing and make sure your links can be followed. 

If you want to comment on my blog in the future, please review my new Comment Policy