You suck.
Ok, now that we have that out of the way, let's make a few things clear... And this might even be good stuff for my A|R friends to know...
There are two broad categories of links that you will find on the pages here at Active|Rain, as well as other sites...
- Follow links
- Do Not Follow links
For the reader, they are one and the same... but they are different for Google (and other spiders). As readers, we can choose to follow any link we find on a page, in a comment or in the sidebar. But it is different for the spiders... they don't follow the links that have a "do not follow" tag. Those links become invisible.
What that means is that those links don't pass along any "Google Juice" to the sites on the other end of that link. The "do follow" links DO pass along some of the juice...
Some examples...
As you look over your blog, there are some links that are follow...
- If you put a link in your post, it is follow
- Links that you put on your sidebar are follow links
- Members that comment on your blog will have their name linked to their profile with a follow link
and some that aren't...
- Links that are in the body of a comment are do not follow
So, when a spammer (the focus of this post) writes a link into their comment, google isn't sending traffic... They aren't getting anything other than human traffic that stumble across the link and follows it to the source.
Don't go flipping out...
The A|R guys have done a GREAT job in putting this together. When you make comments, there is a follow link back to YOUR profile. The links in your profile ARE follow links... and you CAN build pretty good page rank on your profile by filling it out and commenting here. You can then send that juice to YOUR sites with follow links in your profile.
Want to know what the deal is???
Of course you do. Last week I wrote a post here on Active|Rain about FireFox and why you should be using it. Here is one of the reasons... NoDoFollow. It is a plug-in for fireFox that allows you to quickly see which links are followed and which aren't. It highlights every link on the page in either pink (no follow) or blue (follow). You can turn it off or on easily.
This is one of the reasons that you need to use FireFox if you are working your business on the web. It isn't about what your customers use, it is about what tools you have available to better do your job. Of course you want to make sure your site works in other browsers, but that doesn't mean that YOU need to use that other browser full-time...
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