This site is a do follow site. What that means is we removed the do follow tag from our commentary because we believe in commentary link goodness for those that are deserving.
You will need the DoFollow Plugin as well which is available from your plugin install page.
I have been asked what are the current tags being used on Kiwibloke, so here goes:
You will see a lot of these plugins are designed to make the site more spider and feed friendly as well as making it easy to get around my blog. Most of these I would consider to be must haves and are a starting point for blog traffic goodness. They make blogging just a little bit easier.
In 2005 Google drafted a standard called the no follow tag. What this was meant to do is to combat comment spam by telling Google, Technorati and other spider systems not to follow a particular link. By default it is switch ON on your standard blogging software including WordPress.
The problem is that this tag has result in disadvantaging small real bloggers who want to build on the world wide community of discussion. The big guys like TechCrunch, Lifehacker and others don’t need our help building a linked in community and they invariably have it switched on. However the little guy IS disadvantaged because we need these links to help people find us and be a legitimate voice in the discussion.
Almost all blog platforms by default are set up so that a “dead end” piece of code is inserted wherever there is a link in a comment, so that search engines will not “count” the link as they are crawling the internet. This was originally designed to help stop comment spam, but it doesn’t work. What it does is remove some of the incentive for your readers contribute to your site by commenting on your posts.
You can read the Google Blog discussion on this here.
The answer is yes and no. There are some excellent SPAM detection plugins now available that can help. Akismet is a great SPAM tool and for me knocks out 99% of the spam. The number of false positives are quite low these days. I strongly urge that you look at WordPress as your platform because of it’s strong community of plugins.
Once you get a ton of traffic then you are reassess the use or non-use of the nofollow tag.
By building a community of bloggers who consciously disable their nofollow tag and cross promote the fact that they do that, then invariably the community will be strengthened by the cross linking and the “Link Juice” it provides. Secondly by creating a DoFollow policy for your blog you will invariably get a following of bloggers who are willing to support your blog.
If you have WordPress, then you simply need to add the plug NoFollow Free. We also use Nofollow Reciprocity which adds back the tag for the super big websites who don’t need it.
If you have a Blogger blog, then follow the instructions here.
Read Kiwiblokes Do Follow Page here.
We have added to our plugin repository an updated Date Exclusion Plugin called date-exclusion-seo.
Most of my traffic from search engines is through old posts. This is especially true if like us you have been blogging for a long time, and have lots and lots of content. I wanted to remove the date from my old posts only, but I could not find a plugin that worked, so I modified the original plugin to work on WordPress 2.7.X .
There has been plenty of discussion on the matter from various blogging sites including Daily Blog Tips and Problogger.
You can get the plugin here.