Do-Follow Can R.I.P - Long Live No-Follow

On the face of it the removal of the No-Follow meta tag seems to be a great idea, but after testing on this website, I can tell you it is a total waste of time!

I had converted this site over to Do-Follow about 3 months ago, this was after reading many articles on the internet about the pro’s & con’s of the No-Follow meta tag. There  were good arguments for & equally good arguments against the use of this meta tag, therefore the only way to really find out would be to put the theories to the test !  No-Follow..? Do-Follow..? Ok let me give you a little background for those that do not know the story! 

Where Did It All Start..?

A few years ago, 2005 to be precise, Google created a new meta tag named ” No-Follow”, this meta tag was similar in operation to the No-Index meta tag, in that it instructed the search engines NOT TO FOLLOW  links to other peoples websites, that it found whilst crawling your pages. This proposed new tag was incorporated into all new versions of WordPress & the aim of it was to cut down on spam / spammers.

Is This A Good Thing..?

Now on the face of it this sounds like a good thing to have right..? Well yes you would think so, however there were many website owners that were none too happy at the prospect of having their links tagged as No-Follow and so a movement started in order to try and get this No-Follow tag scrapped. Which, simply by the removal of this meta tag, would mean that your website or blog would then become Do-Follow again.

Well as stated at the very beginning of this site, we test out theories & ideas so that you do not have to run the risk of ticking off the Google monster hahaha. So after 3 months of testing what’s our verdict on the Do-Follow / No-Follow issue..?

Our Verdict On Do-Follow

Ok what we found was that 95% of all comments received after removing the No-Follow meta tag, were made simply to aquire a backlink, furthermore what adds weight to this claim is the fact that although there is a comments policy & a request is made to read this policy, I am still receiving a dozen comments per day that blatantly defy the rules laid down in the comments policy. This tells me that the would be commenter is focused on one thing only and that is getting an easy backlink, to what is very often, a crappy website!

As for the argument that you do not receive backlinks from sites that have an active No-Follow meta tag, all I can say to this is “rubbish” ! During this testing process, I had made a comment on “ProBloggers” site, which is a No-Follow website, yet I received a backlink from my comment. This was the first time I had ever visited Darrel’s blog and so there was no other possible explantation for this backlink, other than it was related to my comment.

Now there is also the argument about getting additional traffic from listings in Do-Follow directories & yes you can get traffic from such listings as I have done with this site, but what you do not realise is that the vast majority of people search a Do-Follow directory for one thing & one thing only, BACKLINKS! They are rarely interested in what your blog is about, or your latest article, they are purely focussed on finding similar blogs to their own so they can go drop a useless comment & get an easy backlink.

The Conclusion

So my friends unless your blog is very new and you are struggling to aquire any backlinks, I would suggest that you remove any plugins you have that supress the No-Follow meta tag & allows your site to become Do-Follow, this will put your blog back to the way Wordpress intended it to work. I will be removing the plugin from this site after finishing this article & focus more on what I should have been doing in the first place, writing quality articles!

Steve Nickson | Create Your Badge