Sometimes I do some blog hopping and I find a lot of good blogs out there. So I try to follow what they are doing in the hope of increasing my money from blogging. Lately I have noticed a lot of “U Comment I follow” sign. It is only now that I have discovered what they really meant.

What the “U Comment I follow” sign basically means is that if you place a comment in this blog, hopefully the search engines will follow the author links, or the links on the comments that you placed. This will will result in the commenter hopefully getting a back link as a result of his comments.

Some search engines (like google) say they do not follow the links in the comments. However a test done has revealed otherwise. Others (like yahoo, msn etc.) say they treat the links as if it is any other link. But no matter what, disabling the “No follow” will both be of mutual benefit to the blogger and the visitors of the site.

So what really does “nofollow” mean ? Google orchestrated this scheme. They observed that spammers are putting up spam comments in a lot of blogs in the hope of getting a lot of back links. (Note that back links help boost ranking in the search engines) To remedy this situation and to aend spamming, Google enforced a “no follow” policy when it comes to comments. This was then followed by other search engines.

The question is, did they succeed ? Today the spamming problem has gotten worse and spammers still spam. According to Word Press founder Matt Mullenweg “In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.”

So why should you continue to allow “no-follow” after all, it has no effect after. (This is enabled by default) You are better off protecting your blog by activating spam filters. The adverse effect of “no-follow” is that it punishes the commentor with legitimate and sensible comments. As one blogger puts it so nicely, “PUNISH SPAMMERS, NOT BLOGGERS.”