Note: I thought that this was so important (as many other bloggers may not know this) that I have made this is a temporary sticky post, please see below for newer posts.

I’ve heard that saying, “You Learn Something New Everyday” all my life, and actually found that it is true more often than not. Today was a big learning moment for me though. I learned that the comments on my blog are no follow. I understand what no follow is, and I understand that are Google Ranks are at least partially based on the number of links into our blog. I understand big companies maybe having no follow on their comments, but as a Woman and Mommy blogger, I’ve learned we are a community, and I want to do my part for helping out. If you leave a meaningful, non spam message on my blog, I think you deserve the link back to your blog. As a community member that’s one thing I thought I was doing to help out other women and mom bloggers, but today I found out that if you don’t have a plugin to follow, you don’t follow. That’s right. If you are using WordPress (I actually think this is true of most of the blogging platforms), it by default puts no follow on it’s comments. I’m glad that I discovered that today.

After making the discovery, I started searching for plugins. I read about many different ones and decided on Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin. Why? Well while there were some more simple looking plugins out there to make your links no follow, what I liked about this one is that it allows for some customization that I thought looked real appealing. For example,

• Your links are not followed until you’ve left 3 comments (you can increase this to up to 10 if you like). This encourages readers to come back and become regular visitors instead of just seeing the “I follow” button and dropping a comment for the link. They must take a moment to actually read a few of your posts. I think this is fair.
• If you go more than 14 days without posting (think family emergency), your blog is considered inactive and new comments will not be followed until you are back and posting. While this may seem extreme, it’s actually for your protection. While 14 days isn’t that long, what if you are gone longer? Say months? This will stop your blog from just being a dump of comments from those seeking links in to their site.
• You can deny follow to those that leave “long” names. This is not one that I’m using. I think I put 50 in the option here. It seems that some people though don’t want you to leave your name as I frequently do (Kimberly @ All About Kimberly). I do this because Kimberly is a common name, and I want blog owners to know who I am, but if you don’t like this, then I guess you can turn it off.
• Comments can be manually marked no follow if you do want to keep the comment, but have reasons to want to no follow it. Lucia’s Linky Love gives you this flexibility while some of the other plugins didn’t.

But then I wanted to make sure that you guys knew when you came to my blog that I do in fact now allow links that follow you back to your blog. I did a search for some type of button to put on my site, but all I could find were some pretty simple ones that just didn’t speak to me. So I’ve been at work this afternoon and designed some “I Follow” buttons. You are welcome to use these buttons on your blog, but I would appreciate it if you’d link back to me. I’m going to do a page with these graphics also so you can come back and find them (though that might have to wait until I am back from Florida (WHERE I WILL BE IN THREE MORE DAYS!).