Backlinks don't work for me :(
First, to understand how I ventured into this topic, you should know that Blogger backlinks (the section called "Links to this post") won't appear on this blog. I first discovered this issue quite a while back after I changed the blog's template to the present one you see now. :)The problem doesn't seem to have anything to do with my messing around with the template, as I tried out my template on a test blog and it works there ("Create a link" works). As usual, the answer to most of my problems come from Google.
No answer to no backlinks, but what I found instead...
Needless to say, I didn't find any solution to this issue. :P This is fairly irritating because I would have to 1)debug Blogger's compressed javascript (not a trivial or fun task to do), 2)code my own backlinks (less intimidating than option 1 but why reinvent the wheel?) or 3)forgo backlinks altogether (my current less than ideal choice).However, my issues aren't the main topic here. :) While googling for an answer to my headache, I came across something else instead - removing nofollow for Blogger backlinks. Quite simply, nofollow was invented to tell search engines not to follow a link if a link was tagged as such. It also has further implications such as not contributing to the linked page's PageRank (a magical number that many people are obsessed with), among others.
What's the big deal?
You may be wondering why I'm kicking such a big fuss over a couple of bloggers removing nofollow from their backlinks. Actually I wouldn't have cared if what they were doing actually worked.You see, if you read what I wrote earlier, I mentioned that I would have to debug Blogger's javascript in order to find out why backlinks wouldn't work on this blog. The reason for this should be quite obvious - backlinks in Blogger are implemented using javascript.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain that search engines do not even execute javascript. And backlinks only exist if javascript is enabled. Put the both of them together and you'll realize the simple folly behind the idea that removing nofollow from backlinks actually matters in Blogger.
Just in case you need to hear it from an official source, here's a relevant snippet from Google Webmaster help:
Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.