Follow DoFollow to Attract More Visitors to Your Blog

Every blogger has been there. You spend ages creating a blog – setting it up, designing it, thinking about the content, writing articles, and then after a month or two you realise that you merely have an audience of one: yourself.

No matter the subject every blogger aims to have a meaningful discussion with other internet users. Most bloggers start enthusiastically and with good intentions; but surrender disillusioned a few months down the line, their blogging days over not long after they started.

It's no wonder that many bloggers give up any hope of attracting readers. Technorati have nearly 100 million blogs in their index and they calculate that a new one is started every second! With this much choice readers either tend to stick with what they know or your blog gets lost in the white noise of millions of posts flying around the World Wide Web.

Your aim, as a new blogger, is to find readers and encourage them to keep coming back. All modern blogging platforms these days are equipped with RSS feeds which enable users to remember your site in their browser or RSS reader, but one method of encouraging comments at the bottom of your published articles and bringing yourself to the attention of new readers is by leaving off the nofollow attribute.

In 2005 Google introduced a little bit of new code to be used in a html link, it was to read rel=”nofollow”. Google was worried about how spammers were building up artificial links in order to influence their position in the search engine ranking positions (SERPs). For Google, the number and quality of incoming links to a website is an important sign that any given site is popular and so deserves better ranking positions in their index.

So Google introduced the nofollow microformat. Simplified, it puts a stop sign on a link: it tells the Google bot not to count the link when working out the SERPs. Yahoo and Microsoft followed where Google went and all the blogging platforms such as Wordpress implemented it into their code.

Well what's wrong with stopping spam, your wonder? There's nothing wrong with stopping spam but the introduction of nofollow didn't stop the evil spammers as they just carried on regardless. Unfortunately a lot of the little guys across the net were hit badly by nofollow, so much so that many of them took out the piece of code and went what has become known as “dofollow”.

A lot of the little blogs and websites out there are reliant on those comment links being open so as to build up their incoming link count, and so fellow bloggers found their contributors being less engaged and writing less because an important incentive was taken away.

In order to encourage them back they proudly announced that they were now dofollow and a dofollow community sprang up. Offering a little link love gives other users an incentive to post regularly.

If you have regular quality posts from a variety of readers then not only is it a good moral boost for a hard-working writer, but it also gives the impression to a new visitor that the blog is healthy and popular. And we all know that first impressions count for a lot.

So lets follow dofollow by removing that pesky nofollow attribute from our blogs (what a mouth full!).

The most popular blogging platform is Wordpress. Removing nofollow from this service is easy. Just download and install the Dofollow plugin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sem-dofollow/

If you are interesting in having a professional designed blog then please visit the leading web designers in Stratford for all your digital needs.