Archives for July 2007

As many people who visit this site and many of my other sites knows all of my blogs are do follow. I realize that some of you still might not know what that means. Well, it means that I started using plugins that would remove the nofollow tags from comments way back in October of 2006.

I became a “do follow” blogger in order to reward my regular visitors with a proper link back to their site.

You see, most blogging platforms have nofollow tags built in to the comment area so when you leave a comment on most blogs the nofollow tag that is placed in the link that you left when you signed the comment tells search engines like Google not to follow and index the link.

To heck with that I said. I’ve had a fairly loyal following of readers for quite a while now. Why shouldn’t I give them a link for their loyalty and for leaving fantastic comments that make me think, laugh or inform me of things I hadn’t thought of yet?

In October I started my following experience by using the comment plugger plugin which gave my commenters a link right under the post. Once this post has some comments you’ll see a link to the various people that have left a comment right below the post.

Then, in April, I added the do follow plugin to my site and started the Do Follow Blogroll so that we’d all know what other blogs were also do follow blogs.

I should have actually taken out the comment plugger plugin at that time because I’m actually giving two links every time someone comments! Oops! I forgot about the comment plugger. Perhaps by the time you read this post I’ll have removed that feature.

I don’t think I’ve ever really lacked for comments, but lately, as a result of the do follow blogroll being copied on a number of sites – in some instances in order of a sites page rank! – I’ve been getting all kinds of comments from other bloggers, business owners, business websites and so on who seem only to be leaving a very basic comment in order to get a back link.

So have a number of people on the do follow blogroll. One person told me this morning that someone left a comment on her site recently praising her for being a do follow blogger and then they proceeded to leave a long list of links!

Hello! Do follow blogs are not link directories!

Wait a minute ….

Why did I become a do follow blogger? To reward my regular loyal visitors. I can’t do that properly with the do follow plugin that I’m currently using because everyone gets a link that has had the nofollow tags removed. If people are using sites just to get links well … that doesn’t work does it!

Yeah … so maybe that’s why I’ve been feeling a little used and abused lately.

Hmmmm “I wonder what other do follow type plugins are out there?” I thought to myself.

So I did a search for do follow plugins and one of the first search results was Andy Beards Ultimate list of Nofollow and Dofollow plugins. I’d seen this list in the past of course, but at that time I couldn’t think of a reason why someone would want to use a do follow plugin that didn’t necessarily make all comment links follow.

Well after my experiences of the last few weeks having the same people leaving comments on nine of my husband and I’s blogs – many of which appeared to be pretty much the same comment each time, I’ve learned my lesson and I think I’m going to go back to rewarding only those who are loyal visitors and commenters.

I’m thinking of using the LinkyLove plugin which allows you to set it up so that someone must comment a certain amount of times before their links will follow. Seems a safer bet to me.

The default amount of comments someone would have to leave is set to 10. I may or may not leave it at that if I use this plugin. I’m not going to say of course because those that want to play the system will then know what magic number they must reach.

If the do follow bloggers on my blogroll begin using this it will be a little harder for me to verify if their site follows when I’m checking their sites to add to the blogroll but in an effort to prevent abuse I think I’d better allow my members to use whichever plugin they wish to use.

If I begin using the LinkyLove plugin this will of course be the change to my do follow policy that I referred to in the title of this post.

The final straw the broke the camels back and prompted this upcoming change is due to the fact that someone has now created a search engine to help people find do follow blogs. I can see this being abused and making it even easier to abuse those who only want to be nice to their loyal readers.

The reason that I haven’t begun to use this plugin already is because I’m still having CPU resource problems with my web host. I need to make sure that this plugin isn’t constantly calling the databases and using up a lot of valuable resources on my server.

Does anyone know if this is a light of heavy CPU resource usage plugin?

Does anyone already use the LinkyLove plugin? If you do have you had any problems? Is your site still fairly fast or has it slowed?