I’m still not changing my mind: Getting rid of "rel=nofollow" on comments still feels like the right thing to do. However, I’m noticing more and more discussions about it that are food for thought.
A couple weeks ago, I touched on this and mentioned the disturbing trend of “seo types” listing out dofollow (the art of not using nofollow) blogs and encouraging folks to leave comments on ‘em to get some page rank love. I’ve avoided linking them, but for the sake of discussion, here’s just one: www.toptut.com/2007/06/05/get-many-quality-pr5-backlinks-for-free/
(I’m not singling out toptut to be mean — it’s just the first one I recalled as I’d dropped a comment there myself and it was fricking NOFOLLOW’d omg. Oh, the irony)
It only lists 18 of the dofollowers but offers tips on how to “spam the right way.” No, I can’t make something like that up!
Some good discussion follows in the comments. As you might imagine, some folks on the list showed up. Everyone stays rationale though. No flames.
Randa Clay, the originator of the Do Follow icon in my sidebar, has a post that lightly touches on this and mentions a new plugin that removes nofollow from trackbacks, but not comments. Interesting approach. Basically, the plugin would allow you to “reward” those who trackback to you in their own articles, but not the folks who stop by and comment. In the ensuing comments, I saw a trackback from DoFollow turning evil? which led me to eMoms at Home and her Is the DoFollow Movement Getting Exploited? article.
She pretty much sums it all up quite well. Especially eye-catching is:
Worse yet, spammers have gotten smart. They realize that if they can get one comment approved, most bloggers will let the rest of the comments through. Imagine my horror when I realize this happened to me and one spammer had built up 10 outbound links on my blog to different non-blog sites over a month, using a different name each time – but by using the same email address, they all slipped through unnoticed.
Now I really need to revisit some recent comments and wonder just how “gamed” I’ve been.
Wendy’s larger concern, of course, is that she’s running a business from the blog. Folks are potentially getting for free what she tries to sell for advertising purposes. Now she needs to decide how to proceed: Go back to nofollow or … ?
Some great stuff follows in the discussion. In particular, keep an eye on Andy Beard‘s thoughts. He keeps a “Don’t Be an Idiot” icon by the comment form. His comments policy is worth a look as well. I’m not 100% in agreement with all of it (I hates me those splogs!) but I definitely like the concept and direction.
Like I said at the top, I’m sticking with removing the nofollows for now, but I’m curious to see where this all leads — if anywhere. Is it all just a tempest in a tiny teapot? I’m not a pro and I’m not currently planning to become a pro blogger anytime soon (well, the economy may make that decision for me though!). Should I even care?
In some ways Technorati is a splog that grabs your content, repurposes it, and doesn’t give backlinks, yet everyone seems to be happy linking to them so they rank for almost every term under the sun.
I was banned from WordPress.com during beta, because I had a blog which was at the time around 10 posts, 50% were original, and 50% were articles about WordPress from Ezinearticles.com
In fact at the time Ezinearticles.com only had 10 articles about WordPress, but at least they were high quality.
I had preprocessed them with a text advert in the middle of the article, and at the time WordPress.com had no terms of service.
I still haven’t had that account reinstated.
What annoys me most was that at the time I was doing some testing on XML-RPC which was reporting bugs, which I was relaying to the developer of the software to create workarounds.
It is actually quite funny that over a year later there was a discussion on the WordPress Hackers mailing list asking for people to do some testing of the XML-RPC interface, and in the end some of the developers had to go hunting for tools to do the testing.
It is fairly pointless testing with software which has already built in code to work around any problems.
I can think of hundreds of ways to repurpose content legally. I even license my whole blog under GPL.
Hey Andy – thanks for stopping by.
I hate doing this, but I have to confess my ignorance (sometimes I’m a bit thick). Help me make the connection from my post on dofollow to your comments?
I was responding to the part of my comments policy you might not be comfortable with
In my comment policy I say that I am splog tolerant, because my definition is different to other bloggers.
The way you put it, it sounded like I support all forms of repurposing of 3rd party content, which I don’t.
My take on this whole thing is that the good of removing nofollow really outweighs the bad. Sure, there are people who will abuse any system, and I’m sure some of those people who visited my site just left one comment for the PR5 link, but some of them stuck around for more.
If I were in Wendy’s position, I don’t know what I would do. Right now, it’s easy to manage the comment volume and zap the ones that are taking advantage. Seems like the Link Love plugin would be the way to go once you get to the point where the comments become unmanageable. Still the potential for abuse, but it would take a lot more effort to abuse it.
@Andy – Ah ha! I knew there was a tie-in.
Thanks for that. More food for thought.
@Randa – I’m spot on with you on your first paragraph there. Exactly why I hang with “the movement” (putting quotes around it makes it sound big and mysterious, yes?)
I could see Wendy taking a bit of a fall-back position to just the trackbacks for DoFollow… I just can’t relate to the volumes of spam and page views that she probably has!
I like the even-ness and thoughtfull-ness of your post. DoFollow, just like nofollow, works for some people and not for others. Just like many tools in business actually.
Just because something works in Jane Doe’s business doesn’t mean that it will work for me (or you).Any tools, be it hardware, software, service or process needs to be carefully weighed before and during use.
If I rode the waves of what works for others I would be using a Mac just like all my design colleagues do, or a Linux system like all my techie/engineering mates
I was thinking about the debate that commenting on other sites will improve SEO and help promote your site, but I do think some people put too much emphasis on it. I noticed ever since I made a few adjustments to my blog Google suddenly started to notice me, and I’m sure making sporadic comments here and there had little to do with it. They were simple changes too (like using the Optimal Title plugin to better organize my post titles). Once your blog is as reasonably SEO-ed as can be, content truly becomes king.
BTW, did WordPress remove the nofollow tags some time during their development? I’m not using any dofollow plugins because I noticed my comments AND trackbacks didn’t have the nofollow tags attached to them. Weird. Maybe it’s the theme I’m using. B-)
@Leah – Great point. Not every tool is every person’s best choice.
@Linc – I’d tend to agree with your first bit. As to the latter, not that I’m aware of. I’d guess you either have a plugin doing it -or- your theme has a functions.php that might be helping out. At a guess, whatever is adding the “target=”_blank”" stuff is probably removing the rel=”external nofollow” as well.
DoFollow is something that I’m wrestling with a lot on my own blog. Personally, I think it’s a great way to get more discussion going on in blogs. However, I am worried about linkspam.
Is Akismet enough?
@Chris: Tis fine with me.
I say bring on the noise, partly because one of my greatest fears is that the girl of my dream will somehow stumble onto my blog, only to leave upon realizing that I nofollow all my comments.
I just can’t take the chance of that happening man.
@”wallet” – Akismet does a fair job. Definitely should add Bad Behavior into the mix. I, personally, am currently running Spam Karma 2 with the akismet plugin and pleased.
@Lincoln – You gotta live the dream!
Well, like I told Wendy, I think I’m gonna go with the un-linking suspicious people. Or people who just comment to get their site linked and noticed.
I think that people are getting too concerned over do-follow and spammers. They aren’t anything new and of course we will all have different opinions on what is spam and what is great is that we have complete control over our sites. I feel the benefits of networking and being able to build strong relationships and knowledge more quickly outweigh the negatives of spammers.
@Jenny – That’s pretty much what I’m doing. If I’m not sure I’ll remove the URL. If they come back another day they hey, I have an active participant and link stays.
@Cade – no doubt, you’re correct. I just hate to feel like a doormat
I totally agree with your final sentence – the whole thing is about relationships and networking.
My website has a PR of 5 (not the one that I linked with my name, my other one..lol) and I get very little spam even with dofollow.
For the people that are still on edge, I have a great idea for a new type of do-follow plugin, that no-one would be scared to use. There is only one problem…I don’t know how to code it!
Does anyone here know how to code plugins for wordpress, or could you point me in the right direction of finding someone that could code it for me?
Hi Bucky – you might try the WordPress Pros mailing list or WordPress support forums maybe?
Thanks Chris, I will have a look.
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Its ironic that many bloggers talk about this but then they actually use no follow.
Ironic indeed. If you had read more of the post here you would’ve found that I threw in the towel on do follow several months ago.
Ever more ironic is that post is listed in the “Related Posts” section on this very page!
http://www.solo-technology.com/blog/2007/07/10/sigh-welcome-back-relnofollow/
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