Over the past year or so most of the blog engines have defaulted to using the nofollow tag in comments.
This tag basically tells search engine spiders not to follow the links. While this can be handy if you want to mention a competitor it’s not so useful when you have genuine contributors to your blog’s comments.
While I can understand the reasoning behind the introduction of the tag’s usage I still feel that blog authors should be able to choose whether or not to turn it on or off.
Movable Type allows you to turn it on or off easily, but WordPress doesn’t.
Up until recently I was using a plugin to turn the damned thing off, but I’ve now had to turn it off the hard way – by hand.
If people take the time to comment on my ramblings then the least they should get is a small bit of “link love”!
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
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Cue 7000 comments per post 🙂
I agree it’s a pain to disable them on wordpress. I disabled “nofollow” from day 1 on my blog. The only down side is you have to be careful to screen your comments or you might unknowingly end up in a “bad neighbourhood” situation.
I have heard a lot of feedback from SEO’s regarding comment / trackback spam. Most of them seem to believe that the nofollow is not properly implemented by the search engines and some link love still results from nofollow links. IE: The spiders may not index them directly but they still count towards something.
I’m not sure how true this is but if the volume of comment and trackback spam is anything to go by maybe they know something we don’t?
I screen my comments anyway.. so it’s not really an issue
What plugin where you using? I would like to do the same for ATP.
Mary
There are a couple of plugins for wordpress that remove the “nofollow” junk:
1
or
2
thank you.
I commend you on your Do-Follow policy. I’m setting up the plugin on my blog this week as well. It will be interesting to see if posting gets more frequent.
Terry
I don’t know if it makes any difference in terms of the number of comments due to the policy, but I have noticed that the spiders seem to grab more of my content as a result of it, which may lead to posts being seen more etc., which in turn could lead to more comments etc., ie. a knock on effect
Michele
If people aren’t getting PageRank from commenting on posts, they are less likely to even bother posting on your blogs, so thats another reason it sucks.
> If people aren’t getting PageRank from commenting on posts, they are less likely to even bother posting on your blogs, so thats another reason it sucks.
I don’t believe this is a valid reason. If the motivation to post is to get PageRank, then the blog is better off not getting the comment.
Calvin
I’d have to agree. Link love – yes, page rank no 🙂
Michele
“no follow” is good for blogger or for google?
I think that search engines sometime try to “hurt” users and webmaster…to protect their business with their rules.
Page rank is a game for spammer…a good game invented by google..
Aspirante – It’s a catch 22.
I think that the search engines need to explain their position on using re=nofollow on internal links. There is now a strange trend of webmasters using rel=nofollow on links on internal links on their own web pages. They think that they can control flow of pagerank on their sit by doing this, even if its not a blog comment. Many people use rel=nofollow on links to pages on their site like “privacy policy” and “about us.” Example:www.restaurantica.com.
This is silly and counter-productive. It might also ruin your site. Some webmasters believe that this attribute can be used for SEO – Some SEOs even advocate this policy.
rel=nofollow does help in SEO if you do that properly within a website. For example, you have a few affiliate links from Commission Junction on a page. Google takes the Affiliate links as negative score, but if you apply the nofollow to it, Google will not follow and will not give it negative score.
vbulletin also force nofollow tags on some links in the forum, but currently they don’t nofollow the signature links and links within the post.
Im talking about internal links, not external links. An affiliate link would be an external link, since it points to a page outside of your website