There is always much talk about nofollow and dofollow links on web sites. Much of the discussion is about whether you should make a link nofollow. For blogs, this discussion is centered more around the links in the comments of a blog post. Many visitors may leave a comment in an effort to get a free link back to their blog with a dofollow comment link.
In WordPress you have plugins that can control whether a link in the comments is nofollow or dofollow. In Blogger blogs, however, the default is to use nofollow links in the comments of the posts. In this post I will explain how to change the comment links in a Blogger blog to dofollow, if you would like to make the change.
Removing NoFollow
There are two links in the comments of a Blogger post that default to nofollow: the backlinks, and the comment author’s link. You can change one or both, it is up to you. Both are changed in the same manner, just in different locations.
To change the links, use the following steps:
- Log in to Blogger, and then from the Dashboard click on the Layout link of the blog you want to change.
- In the top menu, click on the Edit HTML link to display the HTML for your template.
- We will need to view all the code in the template, so check the Expand Widget Templates checkbox.
- Now you have two links that you can change:
- For backlinks, search for a expr:href=’data:backlink.url’.
- For the comment author’s web site, search for a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’.
- Delete the value rel=’nofollow’ from the link tag for the link you searched for. This will now make the link a dofollow link.
- Click the Save Template button to save your changes. Now when visitors leave comments, they will receive a dofollow link back to their site.
In both of the above cases, your cursor will move to the link tag that contains the nofollow value.
I currently use the NoFollow Free plugin that allows me to change an author’s link after the author has made a specific number of comments on Technically Easy. The number of comments is 3, so after three comments you get a dofollow link back to your site.
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on November 19, 2008 at 7:27 pm
I tried for about a week to make my blog do follow, deleting the code like above and received an error message in FireFox. One of my readers wrote suggesting I try a different browser. Sure enough, I was able to successfully delete the code in IE. So, if the above isn’t working, try switching browsers.
on November 20, 2008 at 9:09 am
Interesting. I never had a problem with using either Firefox or IE. Perhaps you had an addon that was interfering with Blogger. At least you were able to delete the code.
on November 20, 2008 at 11:35 am
nice tips bro, thanks
on November 20, 2008 at 11:42 am
Andy Beard goes into details about nofollow solutions for various blogging platforms:
http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/ultimate-list-of-dofollow-plugins-banish-nofollow-from-comments-and-trackbacks.html
Although this about one year old now.
on November 20, 2008 at 10:44 pm
There are a few more items people might want to know. I wrote an article in June of 2007 that you may want to read. Click my name to go there.
on November 26, 2008 at 3:15 pm
If you use a default template for Blogger, then removing the nofollow-tag should be no problem. Customized templates are a different story, because the code can be chaotic. There are many site with tutorials for customized templates (i.e. Blogger Buster).
on December 21, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Thanks for this little guide. I recently started a blogger blog and was wondering if it was possible. Maybe I could find more neat things to do with the code in there.
on December 21, 2008 at 11:01 pm
There are many things you can do with the code. I recommend you start a second Blogger blog for testing. That way you can try different things with your template without affecting your real blog.
on June 9, 2009 at 4:51 am
it works for me. i have change one of my blog to dofollow and the traffic start to grow rather than before.
on November 29, 2009 at 3:58 am
Hi you all and dear this blog author,
I suggest you all my friend to don’t turn you blog to Do Follow blog.
Thank you!
on August 23, 2011 at 9:12 am
Really a wonderful article about DO FOLLOW !! Thanks for sharing this and i really liked it-thanks.