Removing NoFollow and the YesFollow Project
Published December 18th, 2006 in SEO/Traffic/Links, blogging, blogs, wordpress pluginsCesar Gonzalez from FleeTheCube has an interesting project going on at The YesFollow Project. You may already know that most blogging software inserts a nofollow tag into links in the comment section by default. Ostensibly, this is to prevent comment spammers from getting a boost to their pagerank with a good link back to their site.
With Akismet and other comment spam filtering software, this isn’t much of an issue any more. The nofollow tag just serves to penalize those who take the time to visit and comment on your blog. Cesar’s explanation of this whole process is straightforward and makes great sense. With that said, I’ve gone ahead and installed the dofollow plugin on this blog.
If you leave a comment or already have left a comment on FreshBlogger, you’ll get a real link back to your site that will count in the search engines. I will still be filtering for spam comments and I’ll also still be moderating first comments from visitors. If you’re not familiar with the way this works, Wordpress allows me to just moderate comments for a visitor who has never commented before. After I approve your comment, you may comment again using the same name, email, and url without having to be approved.
I think this is a natural way to contribute to the blogging community in general and to share what I can with those who are kind enough to stop by and comment. Thanks to Cesar for taking up this cause. Be sure to check out Cesar’s YesFollow Project.
8 Responses to “Removing NoFollow and the YesFollow Project”
- 1 Trackback on Apr 16th, 2007 at 11:15 am
- 2 Pingback on May 1st, 2007 at 5:41 am
The spam filtering software will never be 100%, so I’m pretty sure the nofollow tag still has a reason for existing.
However, I have seen more and more sites “tuned up” by search engine optimization consultants. They try to avoid “link juice” losses and put nofollow tags on everything.
Doing this on a large scale will probably result in the search engines not respecting the tag eventually. Why should they respect something that is used to keep relevant links out of the search engine in order to fool the search engine algorithm into giving them more link juice?
Hi Ray, thanks for posting about this to your readers; it’s an issue that floats in and out of blogger consciousness, but it’s important especially for new bloggers. The basic idea is that the nofollow tag doesn’t do anything to fight spam, but it does hurt bloggers and active commenters. And now that you’ve installed the dofollow plugin, I have even more of a reason to drop by and comment on your entries!
Hi Raphael. I agree with you on the nofollow tags sticking around for a while. I use them for the links on my sociable plugin, but that’s pretty much it.
You also make a great point about nofollow eventually being devalued by the search engines. That’s just what happened with meta tags. Thanks for your comment and I hope you’ll stop by again soon.
Hi Cesar. It’s my pleasure. It makes a lot of sense after thinking about it. I’m looking forward to hearing more from my visitors here. Hopefully, this will provide more encouragement for readers to comment as word gets around.
No sw can assure 100% filter for spams, I think so.
I agree too, would like to read more.