rel=dofollow
I have removed rel=”nofollow” from my comments.
I didn’t even know it was there until I read a few blog posts about the latest stink over the Wikipedia no-follow decision. It turns out Wordpress comes out of the box with no-follow turned on.
I can see Wikipedia’s point in using the no-follow attribute to discourage manipulation of their service. It’s not the perfect solution to the bigger problem they are trying to solve, but I am sure it is nice to know that you are not casting free votes out to spammers when you have that type of weight to your votes.
As a web developer in a large corporation, I know what it is like to compromise your ideals and have to pick your battles from time to time.
So in the spirit of all those ideals lost, I have removed nofollow from my comments in the hope I can spread some link love your way and bump you one step up the Google ladder toward the top of the pile.
<a rel=”sarcasm”>It makes me feel all warm inside</a>
Comments
- Filosof says: February 21, 2007 @ 6:29 am
Well I also have a WP blog and I’ve got my nofollow turned on, because I just don’t care if it’s turned off or on. Is there any proof, that Google really cares about it? Or how much he cares?
I think, that Mr. G. doesnt care about it at all.. :-) At least for links to relevant pages.
- Standardzilla says: February 21, 2007 @ 12:20 pm
@Filosof - Google not only care but they actually proposed the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the first place, and encourage other search engines to support it as well.
This was initially to prevent ‘comment spam’ but it hasn’t done so and just means that when you are now linking to my blog through your comment, I am not voting for you in terms of search engine ranking (which is what Google’s Page Rank is all about).
It’s just taking away the spirit of the web I figure… you have taken the time to comment on my blog and add to the discussion so why can’t I give something back by ‘casting a vote’ your way?
At least while I am a small blog that can manually moderate my comments, I see it as a good thing.
- Filosof says: February 21, 2007 @ 6:39 pm
Ok, and is there any real proof, that G. cares? I have heard about some tests, but never seen any part of Google algorithm, that says - huh, this is nofollow - I won’t care about this link..
Whatabout if nofollow is a kind of protection for blogs - if I have nofollow in my comments AND a spammer success in commenting on my site, than G. won’t penalize ME 4 bad neighbourhood and won’t care about that link.
But for normal comments G. would follow that link and give it apropriate ranking…
- azrin says: March 26, 2007 @ 9:36 pm
So how can we manually put a rel=”follow” instead? I see External and NEXT
- Hobo SEO says: May 26, 2007 @ 10:01 am
Yup we DoFollow as well on our news blog. Nofollow is pointless in stopping spam. Only moderation and akismet keeps spammers at bay!
- Standardzilla says: May 26, 2007 @ 1:02 pm
@azrin - technically a link with no atttribute is the same as rel=”follow”, no need to state it in your anchor.
There is an existing link attribute to ‘vote’ for a page at the moment, the VoteLink. rev=”vote-for”, rev=”vote-against” and rev=”vote-abstain”.
This is currently not well supported by search engines but they will catch up someday.
- Turk Hit Box says: June 17, 2007 @ 11:21 pm
I have written a plugin to remove nofollows from trackbacks only to prevent comment spam: http://www.turkhitbox.com/wordpress-seo/dofollow-trackbacks-plugin.html
- No Follow Sucks says: July 31, 2007 @ 12:03 am
I do feel No Follow does not do the job. Anti-spam measures such as Askimet are much more effective for a blog. For Wikipedia, the tag is much more useful, there is little way for a program to understand the difference between a ’spam link’ and a ‘real link’. But, the way Wikipedia is so well edited does bring the tags use into question…
- Ryan Ward says: August 14, 2007 @ 2:24 pm
I have the dofoloow on my onsite blog. I would recommend adding the notify me of new comments plugin as well. This way you can keep a conversation going once you have enticed people to talk.
- Shannon says: August 24, 2007 @ 6:44 pm
yeah! i found some blogs which allow rel=”follow”! I love it!
- Shannon says: August 24, 2007 @ 6:47 pm
there are some hign PR blogs too. there are PR 4,5,6 which allow rel=”follow”. wahahahaha! just be resourceful and you’ll find it.
- Bape says: September 28, 2007 @ 1:46 pm
Its ironic that many bloggers talk about this but then they actually use no follow.
- Hyanide says: October 4, 2007 @ 7:56 pm
Well done. This is a good move imo. The nofollow tag kinda breaks up the net with google not following etc which can’t be good.
