Sometimes you’ll hear me mention that Aibal is a Do Follow blog. What does that mean exactly? A Do Follow blog allows commenters to drop a link pointing back to their own website when they comment on mine. In addition, a Do follow blog permits such links to be fully recognized by the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. This benefits the target website, as search engines are able to identify the connection (link) between my site and theirs which helps promote the commenter’s website on these services.

The way this works – and bare with me for this is a gross simplification — is that all modern search engines count the amount of links pointing to a particular website to gauge its importance. There are many other factors besides this, but generally speaking, the more links that point to a particular website, the more traffic that site will receive from the various search engines.

The alternative to Do Follow blogs are sites that have No Follow links in their comments section. This style of linking forbids search engines from recognizing (following) the links posted by commenters. Using No Follow links, blog visitors can still see and click on a commenter’s link, but search engines pretend that it’s not really there.

Currently, the vast majority of blogs out there are set to No Follow by default, as this prevents helping spammers to promote their shady websites on unassuming blogs. Unfortunately, legit bloggers aren’t able to fully promote their websites when commenting on these sites. The best solution, if you’re a blogger like myself and want to support the community, is to set your blog to Do Follow and implement a decent captcha filter.

If you’re thinking of joining the Do Follow movement, you can request to get your site added to Tucson SEO Solutions Do Follow List –  a growing compilation of quality sites that are set to Do Follow.