Do Follow

I was over at Dirt Digger's blog, "Blunders with shoots, blossoms 'n roots", the other day and noticed an icon I hadn't seen before. "Spread Link Love Do Follow," it said. What in the world? So I clicked on the "Read More" link. Yes, I'll follow any link given a chance, even ones I have no clue as to what they are and who doesn't want to spread the love?

It turns out our wonderful blog hosters automatically put the "nofollow" HTML attribute on our comments. I had no clue. I don't go in and read the source code from my blog very often. For those that are clueless to what I'm talking about, "nofollow" tells the robots that spider the web to not follow the link, but more importantly it means your link is considered not important and isn't counted in calculating your ranking on search engines.

They do this to try to keep spammers out. They figure if spammers can go up in search engine rankings by posting, then there will be a lot of spam out there just waiting to happen. Does it? I doubt it. People still have to type in that annoying list of letters to post a comment. And I have power. Muhahahah! (I was actually at an evil laugh contest the other day and the guys can do it so much better than the girls, but in print we are all the same). I can delete any comment that I don't like. I haven't used it yet, but I can.

Also I take umbrage to them calling my commenters unimportant. I love my commenters. So from now on you will be counted. I've changed my template to get rid of that tag. Now if I could only figure out how to change my comments page, I can add an icon.