iFollow

chrishambly — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:13:18 -0400

I wrote this page so that you do not have to "view source" to ascertain if I use the "no-follow" tag in the comments section of this Blog, or not. By reading this you can be safe in the knowledge that I do not employ it.

The no-follow tag was invented as a method of trying to eliminate Blog comment spam, which was playing havoc with dear Google's algorithm. So what you'll discover now is that the majority of Blogging platforms now ship with the "no-follow" tag included in the code. You can easily check that out by "viewing source" and looking at the HTML itself, if you do not know what that means it's time to learn.

No-follow?

Yes, this is a snippet of code which instructs search engine robots to not follow urls in a web, or more to the point, to not pass on any page rank to the linked page. The logic here is that unscrupulous webmasters/mistresses were using robots (still do) to automatically post comments with a url back to their site which they are/were pimping.

Why take it out?

I have not employed it on my Blog here because I think that if you are kind enough to come along and leave a comment the least I can do is share some Google Juice back to your site, it would be pretty selfish otherwise, which is common practise actually. As well as that I have an anti-spam comment system in place which is perfectly adequate of detecting a human.