On Monday, Snoskred posted about Do Follow. I had been wondering about that, about which is better, because everyone who has an opinion on it thinks that their way is the best way. Basically, Do Follow/No Follow is about linky love and spam. Those who are Do Follow code their blogs so that when people leave comments, the search engine 8-legged things that go out and find links will find them. Those that are No Follow code so that the links aren’t findable (is that a word?) and they won’t get spam. I coded mine to be Do Follow long before I really knew what it was.

For those people who are really obsessed about their search engine ranking and how they rank on various social networking sites, they’ll want to be Do Follow. Snoskred’s friend Sephy has a post about how to do this. On the other hand, those who are so paranoid about spam that even with comment moderation and the silly word verification thing, they want to do everything possible to prevent even one iota of spam getting through to their comments. There are ways to do that too. If you’re on Blogger, don’t do anything, since your code is No Follow by default. The spambots can be overcome with simple comment moderation. I moderate, but I don’t do the word verification thingy. I hate it myself, so I don’t subject people to having to drink to see that straight enough to fill it in. But I moderate only because I want to know what’s going on my blog before everyone else does. Hey, it’s my blog and I can moderate it if I want to.

Now, there’s more to this Do Follow/No Follow thing. Whenever someone new visits my blog, I like to visit theirs (if they leave me the means to) and see who they are. I’ve picked up many new blogging friends this way. It also give me a chance to reply in the most appropriate manner. Which brings me to…

You comment, I reply. As you may have noticed, I have been doing my best to reply to everyone who leaves a comment on my blog. The best way for me to do that is to comment on my own blog, so it becomes like a conversation. I don’t do it so much to increase my traffic or anything like that. I just think it’s a really nice thing to do. Someone is talking to me. I should at least acknowledge their contact, right?

The one thing that I’m kinda bad about is commenting on other people’s blogs. I don’t feel obligated to comment to every post every one in my feed writes. That’s a fast track to a full-time, very unproductive job – kind of like forwarding all that “forward this for good luck” crap I get in my inbox. I do try to comment at least every few posts, to let you know I’m still reading. When someone new comments on my blog, and I visit their blog, I don’t necessarily comment unless their blog and its content resonates enough with me to want to. Simple as that.

I enjoy blogging. I don’t decide whether or not to comment on someone’s blog based on their Do Follow/No Follow/iReply status. I only comment when I have something to say, simple as that. Also, at this point I’m not too concerned with rankings. I mean, if someone refuses to read my blog because I don’t have a Technorati rating star level 74 or something silly like that, well, I don’t need ‘em. But I do want to be a good blogger, that’s something that’s going to make me happy about my blog, so that’s what I’m gonna do.

Read more about the Do Follow movement here.
Read more about the iReply movement here.

Now, Snoskred, what do you know about the whole co.mments thing? Is it extra work to the point that I’m better off just trying to remember where I commented to see if people reply, or is it a Google Reader-like miracle?