For a few weeks I’ve been on a campaign to rid the blogosphere of the dreaded nofollow attribute. Of course, I didn’t start this. But I’m convinced that nofollow must go. So much so that I’ve been asking everyone I know to spread the word.

A few days ago, Randa Clay had the great idea of creating a badge. Great idea, I thought. Why didn’t I think of that? Well, the great thing is, she has.
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As bloggers, what do we want? Well, we want traffic and readership. We want readers to engage in conversation through commenting. And we want links back to our blogs.

When I began blogging, I knew commenting on other blogs was important. My comments created interest in my blog, which led to increased traffic, which led to more readers.

I also thought it would lead to more links to my blog. Every day I’d visit and leave comments on anywhere from 12-20 blogs. And each day I’d check for link backs in Technorati and Google Blog Search. But I wasn’t getting any. I didn’t know why. I thought I might be doing something wrong.

It was only later that I learned that almost all blogs don’t reward commenters with link backs. That ticked me off a little bit so I looked into why.

It seems that all blogware – WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type, etc – inserts a little piece of code in all outgoing links that come from comments. In an attempt to stop comment spam, this little piece of code tells search engines not to follow and record any outgoing links placed in comments. Essentially it neuters your comments. And, what’s worse, it doesn’t stop comment spam.

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Finally, I’ve removed ‘nofollow‘ from comments.

As a blogger, or website owner in general, you want links coming back to your site/blog. Links to your site is one of the major ways to increase your Google ranking. That’s why in the blogosphere, link love is high currency.

If you knew that, then you likely think that each comment you leave on a blog would give you more links to your site or blog. Most often, though, this is not the case. Most blogware has a little piece of code it attaches to outgoing links from comments called a ‘nofollow.’ What does nofollow do, well, it tells Google bots not to follow links off your blog. Hence, no link love and no Google Juice.
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Comment spam. Don’t you love it?

I’ve been officially blogging since January 8th and I’ve already collected and deleted more than 600 spam comments. In the same amount of time I’ve recorded more than 200 legitimate comments Akismet (thank you to all of you, by the way). If it wasn’t for , I can’t imagine how much more work blogging would be.

So far Akismet has caught every piece of comment spam while only catching three legitimate comments. So I want to send a shout out to Matt Mullenweg of WordPress for it’s development. As of 6:40am this morning, here’s the amount of spam Akismet has caught. I refreshed the page a few times and the numbers jump quite a bit in only seconds between refreshes. And look at this number – 94% of all comments Akismet catches is spam. WOW!

Steve Rubel reports that eBuilt Group tracked 8.8 million pings on weblogs.com between January 23rd and January 26th and found that 53% of all pings is spam, 64% of all pings from blogs in English is spam and 56% of all pinging blogs are spam. Amazing, huh?
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A couple of weeks ago I launched a new site for Dr. Travis Elliott. From our initial consultation, Dr Elliott saw the benefit of having a blog. Yet, he also needed a ‘static’ website to give information about his services and classes. Most importantly, he wanted to easily manage his content for both the blog and the ‘static’ site.

In the final design I used the pages feature in WordPress to create the ‘static’ pages that you’d find on any brochure site. We made sure the blog was on the ‘homepage’ while still adding a brief intro about his work.

Dr Elliott is trained as a Naturopath. He’s more recently trained in an interesting alternative therapy called BodyTalk. Based in Applied Kinesiology and western medicine, BodyTalk looks at healing the whole of a person’s physical body, emotions, mind, and spirit. He works with many types of ailments, including chronic diseases, with great results. Certainly interesting work.

Error pages. We’ve all seen them (usually when we’re looking for something we really want). Sometimes they help us. Sometimes not. But most often, they’re dead ends – telling us little more than ‘page not found’ and leading us no further.

Why? It’s so easy today to create custom error pages. Why don’t more site owners do so?

While error pages can certainly be a pain the butt for our visitors, they can also be an opportunity. How?

First, it can be an opportunity not to frustrate our visitors or make them feel stupid. Nothing does both more than ’404� – Page Not Found.’

Second, the error page can offer great opportunity to shine and show you’re take the extra step in customer service. Imagine if your error message said, “Page not found. Ah, looks like you’ve stumbled onto a bad link that I haven’t found yet. I’m sorry. This is certainly not your fault. Here, check out the options below and see if that helps you find what you’re looking for.” Then, give them a site map.

Quite a bit better, huh? I add a similar message on my error page. Then I use Dagon Design’s WordPress Sitemap Generator Plugin to generate a sitemap right on my error page. This way, visitors have a better chance of finding what they want. The reason I chose DD’s plugin is because it’s highly configurable. To the point that I can easily exclude pages from my site map – pages like redirects after form submissions, for instance.
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I like Google. And I want every single page of content on my site in Google’s search database. Likely, you do too.

Now we could each wait for Google’s bots to crawl our sites and find our content – both old and new. Or, we could force the issue a little bit by taking advantage of a Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Part of Google’s Webmaster Tools is Google Sitemap. With Google Sitemap, you can submit a site map of your website/blog to Google and their bots will pick up your new content right away. Much faster than waiting for the bots to come back around your server.

My new friend Gary Conn covers the ‘how to’ using WordPress and a WordPress plugin in a great post from a couple of days back. Read his post for the details. But here are the highlights:

Step One: Add Your URL to Google.
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Here’s a pretty good video done by Jack Humphrey at The Friday Traffic Report. I found this video on YouTube. Check it out. If you don’t know what trackbacks are, how to create them and what marketing advantages they provide, Jack does a pretty good job with this intro/how-to.
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