DoFollow?

[mothhawk]

That be it - and so succinctly put

The bit I'm falling over me 'peas' is...

....do I go find web site B and link it to web site A and if yes, by code, by words, by erm what?

OR

....do I wait for web site B to come and find me at web site A and if yes, when does the earth move for them both?

AND

....how do I spot the NOFOLLOW?

Okaaaayyy... for me, I'm getting so far out of my depth that the fish have lights on their noses, but I'll take a deep breath and give it a go...

You need sites to come (link) to you. Every time you link to a site, you give them a bit of "your" ranking. If they link back to you, of course, that's OK and you get a bit of theirs back. If they are higher ranked than you, then you get a bit more than you give.

The best links are unsolicited ones - genuine "what a great website I must link mine to it" type links, (because search bots can tell these days )

But...you can go to sites and politely ask if they would like to link to yours.

You can increase the popularity of linking to your site by putting articles of interest on it that make people want to link, and will then recommend to other sites to link, for example by being the first with a bit of breaking news or gossip (Know any good tidbits?).

Assume most sites are NoFollow, which is the default situation. If you google "list of dofollow sites" using the quotation marks, you'll find quite a few sites, e.g.:
Huge List of DoFollow Sites! | Zakpack.com

Most social sites/blogs etc are dofollow.

So deep I'm getting the bends now - that's my lot

[piskieinboots]

*sends oxygen

I've been tying my feet the chair over the last couple days so that I could find my way back out of some of the research!!

I stumbled on some software called Commentluv (mind that's only for WordPress) - have you heard of it? I'll look a bit more before I buy - but it's always good to get a real human to say if it works for them or not

[Newton]

Genesis did a very good explanation in vocal form........follow you follow me.........great tune!

[mothhawk]

sorry, not heard of commentluv. mind you, i'm just an armchair theorist - don't have a blog /website, just interested in stuff (until it gets too complicated!). Bit of a butterfly too, lose interest and move on to something else that looks interesting, so never really learn the whole story about anything.