Do Follow and New Blogger

Have you seen the I Follow, Do Follow or D-List posts and blogrolls of blogs? These kind folk have modified the code of their blog template or have added a plugin to their blog that allows search engine spiders to follow the URLs of bloggers who leave comments.

If you are interested in becoming a Do Follow or I Follow blogger and you would like to know how to become one, check out this post from Andy Beard:

Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins - Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks

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There are a few issues with Blogger and becoming a Do Follow or I-Follow blogger. Blogger automatically puts a nofollow tag on every URL in the comments that are left on your blog. To make your blog a Do Follow or I-Follow blog, you must remove the nofollow tag from your template. That is easy and you may visit any of the links above for directions.

There is one thing that seems to have been left out of most explanations I have read about removing the nofollow tag on Blogger. Namely, removing the nofollow tags from blog comments and trackbacks only affect the post pages, where each post is shown on a page with the comments below the post.

You cannot remove the nofollow from the popup comment page where you actually type the comments. This is controlled by Google and you cannot change it. However, if you are a Blogger member, the link will take readers to your profile page. So, it is a link of sorts. Whoopie!

To see what removing the nofollow tag does, you should click on the title of a post, which should take you from the blog home page to the post page where only that post is shown. Under the post are the comments for that post. If you highlight the comments and View Selection Source, you will see see that there are no nofollow tags on the post page comments.

Okay, so you are officially a DoFollow or I-Follow blogger. Whew. Why all the confusion? Blogger has inserted NOFOLLOW/NOINDEX tags on every page, even post pages! What? Yeppers. This does not affect your DoFollow or I-Follow status. You are providing a pathway for links to be followed back to the commenter's blog.

I just wanted to bring this to your attention in case someone says "Your comments have nofollow tags on them." Show them the post pages without the nofollow tags. Now, if those pages have nofollow tags, you need to go back up and read one of the posts linked above.



Even on the post page, if you View Page Source and scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see Google code that begins like the code pictured on the left.

Click images to open a larger version in another tab or window.



Now look at the end of the third line of code and you will see the infamous NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW code:









Does anyone know a work around for the NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW tag pictured directly above? It is found on every Blogger page right before the end body, end html tags.

If so, please leave a comment. Share your knowledge with the technologically challenged. Like that? It suits me sometimes! LOL

Tags: I-Follow, Do Follow, D-Link List, remove no follow from Blogger template