When you choose to comment on a website/blog (a blog is a website that is continuously being updated with articles, like this one), you have a choice to add a link to your site (rather it be your myspace profile, blog, favorite site, friends website, etc) through a clickable link attached to the name you comment with or in the comment area itself.
Spammers (a spammer in this since, is someone who advertises their website by leaving a comment, that has nothing to do with the website/blog they are commenting on) caught on to this and decided to use it to their advantage.
The 'NoFollow'
Therefore, as an attempt to reduce spamming, someone came up with the idea (full of good intentions, but with negative results) of not allowing any links in comments to be crawled by the search engine bots. In other words, if you comment (with a link) then no search engine is going to put your link into the search engine result, even if you have positive intentions to provide value to others. Also known as the 'nofollow'.
How it Works
When you do a search on a search engine, it puts the most popular results first. If you left a comment on a popular website/blog and your comment has a keyword of something that is searched, they will not find you.
When search engine bots crawl (searching for new information to add to the search engine results) your website/blog, the bot knows to skip the comment area through a string of code within the website/blog. This code can be removed and once removed, the bot will add all the comments as well.
The "You comment, I Follow" image is designed to explain (to others who know about this) that you installed a plugin (to rid of this) or removed the 'nofollow' code and in hopes to encourage others to do the same. :)
Depending on your blog platform, there are different ways to remove this from your blog. Generally speaking, you can goto your CSS template (where all the html code is located), hold the Ctrl key and press F, type "nofollow" to find the code, and remove the end code from the comment code.
There are a variety of websites explaining how to remove this code from your blog platform. Here are the popular ones:
How to remove the nofollow from Wordpress
How to remove the nofollow from Blogger
How to remove the nofollow from Typepad
How to remove the nofollow from Movable Type
I hope that helps, you can also do a search for nofollow/ U Comment, I Follow, images.
Posted by: Nicholas Powiull
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