To Follow or Not to Follow

That is the question. And so the Shakespearean version of “to be or not to be” has arrived the internet. There has been many discussions surrounding this area and the question remains satisfactorily unanswered. So what is it going to be? Should we dofollow or nofollow?

What is nofollow?

First let us understand what the concept of nofollow is. Nofollow, or simply do not follow, is a mechanism that google introduced to fight SPAM and is suppose to improve quality on searches, by eliminating false links. The attribute rel=”nofollow” tag, not only, does not credit any links with this attached to them, but may also deprive others of well-deserved link juice. Now, imagine that you are writing an excerpt about an article and obviously referring to it. Why would you nofollow that link? There are actual SEO fanatics that use this attribute in almost every link they have, hoping to be clean and not losing the all-so-important PR. PR is important and should by all means be managed, but that is a different matter.

What is dofollow?

Quick answer: The opposite of nofollow or without the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

So what do we do?

As many of you will agree, or disagree, I believe that the right dose is a little bit of both. Fully following everything is not the answer, particularly if you do not moderate your comments and have a lot of outbound links. I would recommend, not to follow on corporate links, as they do not need your juice and most of the time they are unrelated, someone you exchanged links for just a short period of time, and links to blogs you are not familiar with. However, if you have a blogroll with friends and trusted blogs to link with, that should definitely be dofollow.

How about you? What are you doing with your blog? Do you follow or not? If you do not know how to see this attribute on your blog, let me know and I will look it up for you.

Follow or Nofollow
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