I DoFollow Genius

Some people say I use the word Genius too liberally. I admit I use it a lot, but I also believe that there are many different ways to be brilliant.

I was reading the Pearsonified Blog, (by another brilliant blogger) on the 14 day anniversary of the Indie Virus. He commented on a post by Cesar Gonzalez on why he decided to use the DoFollow plug-in for WordPress on his Blog. Chris Pearson made such a compelling argument for this, in line with his Indie Virus project that I had to go read what Cesar said.

From his post at Flee the Cube:

Basically, the “rel=nofollow” tag was intended to fight comment spam (which it hasn’t) but it has instead hurt the blogosphere by not giving search engine credit (ie. Google Juice) to thoughtful commenters…ok, so maybe not all of them are thoughtful, but that’s besides the point.

So I installed the DoFollow plugin to fix the problem. What this change means for you is that leaving a [thoughtful] comment or pingback on Flee The Cube will contribute to your PageRank. Ever so slightly. So you get the Google Juice and I get more comments. Are you starting to see how this is a win-win situation for bloggers?

He goes on to humbly state that he didn’t originate this idea and attributed the original bloggers who inspired him.

What’s interesting about DoFollow is that if a spam comment slips through before you have the chance to moderate it, it doesn’t matter. You can set it not to disable nofollow until a comment reaches a certain age.