Sometimes you’ll hear me mention that Aibal is a Do Follow blog. But 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 backlinking to be fully recognized by the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Bing. This benefits the target website, as search engines are able to identify the connection (link) between my site and theirs, which helps promote their site on these services (SEO).

The way this works – and bear 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 the search engines will ignore them.

Currently, the vast majority of blogs out there are set to No Follow by default, as this prevents spammers from promoting their shady websites on unmoderated 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 and want to support the community, is to set your blog to Do Follow and implement a decent captcha filter in addition to an automated spam filter like Akismet.

If you’re thinking of joining the Do Follow movement, you can request to get your site added to one the of various Do Follow lists out there. This will ensure a rush of eager comments to your site. But be warned, it will almost certainly attract spammers!

*UPDATE* After many months featuring do follow commenting, I’ve reluctantly had to go back to no follow links. The amount of poorly written and spammy comments was too much to moderate. If I can find a way to moderate comments more efficiently, I would consider going back to Do Follow. Hit me up if you have any idea.