Do Not Follow
A year and a half ago I entreated everyone to jump on a Pollyanna Blogosphere movement to install plugins that reverse the out-of-the-box rel=no follow function in your external comment links.
I must advise you to deactivate and/or remove this plugin immediately. I don’t want to give away any of Michael Martine’s WordPress SEO Secrets, but let’s just say he managed, in about two sentences, to change my mind about this once and for all.
This was the first piece of optimization advice I enacted (that I wasn’t already employing) after studying his search engine optimization tutorial. Within two weeks of this one change, all by itself, I gained an entire point in pagerank.
Like World Peace, the Golden Rule, the Wiccan Rede, Compassion for Your Fellow Man, etc… in theory it’s a great concept — if everyone actually participated in it. Which, like so many things morally and ethically superior, the vast majority of people do not willing participate, thereby reducing the effects of the well-intentioned individual to a crumb of sand against the ocean.
While a little smidgeon of reward in linkage goes from my blog to each commentator, there are so many hundreds (thousands) of other comments you’re leaving elsewhere where the links are not being followed. The cumulative positive effect on the blogs of my commentators is barely noticeable, while the cumulative impact on MY blog is hundreds of external links to blogs with lower pagerank than my own… a net negative, in a major way.
I realize that I can’t single-handedly raise up anyone else’s pagerank in the search engines by following their links, yet I can drag my own pagerank down very quickly with the same noble function.
Do not follow my original advice. Do not follow external links in your blog comments. I recommend you go check your pagerank right now, then immediately deactivate the Do Follow plug-in. I humbly apologize to anyone I may have swayed in this regard.
We’ll find some other ways to save the world, ‘k?
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
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[...] UPDATE: I have done a complete 180 about this. I could just delete this post, I suppose, but I’ve left it up as a transparent representation of my thought process over time… Read it if you wish, but know that I no longer advise what I recommended in this original post. Here’s my more recent position — Do Not Follow [...]