One good way to get traffic to your website is by using the comments feature found with most Blogs. When you write well thought out comments on Blogs and add your URL to the “Website URL” box you give readers of your comment a way to read more of your ideas. This of course means writing useful comments knowing that spam will likely be quickly deleted.

One additional benefit that many BlogMasters like to give those that comment on their Blogs is that they remove the “NoFollow” attribute that is added to all comment URLs by default in most Blog software. By doing this they also allow their site to pass some PR to the sites of webmasters that choose to comment on posts in their Blog.

By hunting around you can find many Blogs that are no longer buying into the idea of using the “NoFollow” attribute. One that I recently stumbled on is a music site called The Digital Guitar. I’ll be using this site as an example to show how you can tell if a site is using the NoFollow or not. For an example first lets view one of the posts on this site, “Why Learn Music Theory?”. After clicking on this link you will notice there are several comments. Notice that one is from zac439.

Now right click in your browser window and choose “View Page Source” or “View Source”. You are now looking at the source code your browser uses to build the page. Now search for zac439. You will find the code that is used to display a link. It looks like this href=http://www.guitarfact.com>zac439. This is an example of a link that is not using the NoFollow. If it was, you would see rel=’nofollow’ in the link.

Now, does removing the “NoFollow” mean that you will receive more spam? No! Spam will happen with or without this attribute. Spammers would rather get a link, but they are more interested in exposure. The way to stop spam is to put in plugins that look for the telltale signs and by moderating your blog. It only takes a couple clicks to delete a spammy comment, making sure there is none in your blog will do more to discourage spammers than the “NoFollow” ever could. They don’t spend the time checking to see if you are using the attribute.

So, how do you get rid of the “NoFollow” and encourage your readers to comment? With wordpress that is pretty easy. Go to the wordpress site, find and download the plugin, FTP it to your plugin folder (after unzipping it) and finally go into admin and turn it on. Next be sure you have moderation turned on so you will be notified and you can delete spam if it comes in.

In short the “NoFollow” only discourages readers from commenting in your Blog. By letting other know that you are a “DoFollow” blog you encourage your readers to comment and continue to visit your blog.