Do Follow blogs are those that allow the readers to write their comments on them. As against them, there are No Follow blogs that prevent the placement of comments.

While some blog sites allow the readers to offer their comments irrespective of their quality, there are others such as WordPress that do not allow that. This is done by appending HTML attributes called ‘Do Follow” or “No Follow” to the blogs according to their policies.

How to identify the “Do Follow” blogs?

If you want to make creative, informative and useful comments on a blog, there is a simple way to identify the “Do follow” blogs.

Just hit on the View button on the browser page of the blog post and click on the ‘source’ from the drop down menu. It will open up the source code of the blog post. Then you can use the Search or Find function to see if it has rel=’external’ term near any comment. If you find one, it is a Do Follow blog. If you find the term rel=’external nofollow’ or rel=’nofollow’, it means you cannot make any comments.

Advantages of Do Follow Blogs

There are several advantages of Do Follow blogs. When you write unique, informative and useful content in a blog, it tends to inspire admiration or disagreement in the readers who are usually impelled to express their opinions by commenting upon it.

They may make some references to other relevant content either in their own blogs or in the blogs of others by providing links for further reading. This is how it should be. This is one way to widen the area of knowledge or discussion on the subject of the blog.

Another advantage lies in the optimization of the blog from the search engine’s perspective. The comments create back links for the commentators’ blogs. This kind of inter-commenting builds up an interactive community of bloggers on a particular niche or subject and a network of connecting links that are helpful for all the participants.

Unfortunately this kind of commenting has degenerated into a kind of spamming for promoting the websites for search engine optimization. The readers of the blog, instead of making any creative and useful comments, just add some inane words followed by links to their own blogs. This may be called artificial link building.

Some webmasters have developed software that can find out the blogs of your niche. All you need to do is to fill up the search bar with the niche words or phrase and you get a list of blogs in your niche.  Some software even provide comment templates which can be filled up in the comment areas to get the back links for SEO purpose.

While the “No Follow” attribute prevents needless seoing of useless content or spamming, it also prevents the publication of genuine and creative comments. Some adventurous souls have found plugins to circumvent even WordPress HTML commands for No Follow.

What is needed, therefore, is that instead of installing No Follow attributes, the blogger community should encourage its members to desist from spamming and contributing only   informative and useful content in their comments.

At the same time, the robots of the search engines, too, have become more sensitive to link harvesting and blacklist the sites whose webmasters resort to such unhealthy practice of link building.