Terminology – DoFollow and NoFollow

There is just way too much jargon out there. With the growth of web 2.0 comes the growth of terminology that we need to get our head around. If ROFL, LOL, IMAL, LMAO are not enough then comes things like tags, Digg this, Stumble that, backlink this, .tv, .me, micro-blogging, clouds, XML and XHTML. C’mon Tweeple!

So the question is, do we really need to complicate things even more? Well of course we do! That’s what Internet people do, they make things simpler and quicker by complicating them. Sort of anyway. They take a simple concept and funk up the name so you need to spend hours researching what it is only to find out you knew what it was all along, however through another term coined by someone else.

Lets take DoFollow and NoFollow links for example. The first time I laid eyes on these terms I thought here we go, another way to drive traffic or optimise your site to get an extra 3 visitors per year or give you brownie points for the search engines (also known as “page rank juice“). I decided to ignore it and move on yet these silly terms kept popping up all over the place. The funny thing is no one ever bothers to explain them, they use the term like its assumed knowledge by dropping them in and moving on. Or if they do explain, they explain them like it was some new uber feature leaving you perplexed and contemplating whether what you have learnt so far needs to be discarded to make way for this new mega-concept.

How about this:

DoFollow Link: <a href=”http://www.xxxxx.com”>Link</a>

NoFollow Link: <a href=”http://www.xxxxxx.com“ rel=”nofollow“>Link</a>

DoFollow is a normal link that search engines will regard as a link back to your site. A NoFollow link is a link where a search engine will disregard the link back to your site. DoFollow is better for search engines and page ranks (aka page rank juice). NoFollow not so great for search engines and page ranks. Use NoFollow to ensure best optimisation and value for paid links from your site.

Now why do we need this jargon to clutter up the net? I understand the need to term a “NoFollow” link as it is different to the standard link but why the “DoFollow”? Its a normal link!!! The problem arises when people, bloggers in particular, start refering to forums as DoFollow and NoFollow forums. Or DoFollow and NoFollow blogs. I feel sorry for the NoFollow blogs because they have been branded as “No – Follow” which to the untrained and relatively normal brain means that you “should not follow them”.

I’m calling for simple organic meanings to stay like that, simple and organic. If they are special then sure, name them, but for the basic and clean  terms keep them as is, it’s confusing enough as it is.