Comments on: WP SEO Tips: To Follow or Not to Follow

By: Smiths R Us » Archive » Nofollow and the Spam War Arms Race

Smiths R Us » Archive » Nofollow and the Spam War Arms Race — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:52:18 +0000

[...] have caused me to rethink the use of the nofollow attribute on my blog comment links. Much has already been written about whether or not to use the nofollow attribute, so I won’t re-hash those arguments here. [...]

By: Discover Doug » Archives » REL=Nofollow Removed (so now I have a Commenting Policy)

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 22:27:36 +0000

[...] In making this decision, I was influenced by posts on several other blogs, including JLH Design Blog, Sabastian’s blog, More Earnings via Search Engine Optimization, and weblog tools collection. [...]

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:12:32 +0000

Pande: Heh, kind of like your comment?

Phillip: WP SEO Tips is the series I’m writing about. It won’t always be 100% directly about SEO, but it’s in that arena and will be the primary focus.

By: Phillip Kemp

Phillip Kemp — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:56:33 +0000

Hi have you noticed any gain or loss in your rank with /index/follow from nofollow? IE why call your title SEO if it is only about search behaviour and spam. did it actually optimize your site?

By: Ellen

Ellen — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:57:16 +0000

This makes alot of sense for those of us who screen all are comments before they appear and use filters like Askismet. Why I should have to do anything to my blog for any corperation in America is beyond me.

By: Gustavo Bacchin

Gustavo Bacchin — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:47:48 +0000

It leaves the decision to webmasters about using or not, which I think is great move from Google. Hopefully the other SE will follow and the TAG will become a standard.

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:45:41 +0000

It would be good if the NOFOLLOW function was built in to WP. I’ve got about half a dozen other features I’d like to see built in too. But I’ve also got about half a dozen plugins which give me those features. Isn’t that one of the reasons why we love WordPress so much?
I’m guessing that the WP developers have to consider which features would be most useful in a standard installation. Leaving NOFOLLOW on comment links is useful to a blog without a functioning comment spam blocker.
We all know that we can tweak and twiddle with WP to our hearts content, but not all of us do, and I suppose that it’s those people that the standard installation is tailored for.

By: jaren

jaren — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:01:57 +0000

thanks for the info… Nofollow or follow.. now it’s clear..appreciate the explanation

By: Inspirational Quote Maniac

Inspirational Quote Maniac — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 06:37:40 +0000

Now, it’s a controversial move for sure.
I don’t understand why some people happily use the Top Commentators plugin to rewards the top commentators but shy away from following your move to get rid of the no-follow tag.

By: Robert Accettura

Robert Accettura — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:43:11 +0000

I don’t think it was ever truly intended to “prevent spam”… the intent was to make it so that spammers didn’t benefit from spamming.

I keep it enabled… now I know for certain spammers don’t benefit.

I think it also helps to know that people who post stupid comments just for the sake of having their link on a blog don’t get the Google juice. IMHO a good link is really from being linked to, not by writing something for the purpose of getting a link.

Maybe that’s just me.

By: Anghus

Anghus — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:10:35 +0000

I’ve been using the linklove plugin for sometime now. The great thing is that I can easily decide how many comments a person needs to have before his/hers link get follow tag.

By: Luis Cruz

Luis Cruz — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:30:44 +0000

I’ve been using the dofollow plugin for over a month now, but I wish the function were built into WP. The nofollow tag doesn’t really do anything to combat spam anyway, so why should legitimate commenters not get some link love?

By: Mostly Technical

Mostly Technical — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:29:17 +0000

@Actually, I do have a name! It’s Doug. “Mostly Technical” is my nom de Blog

Anyhow, I’m not interested in micro-managing my blog. I do like to know the nitty gritty though, then use that to apply a system which I can apply quickly and easily. I certainly don’t want to get in to editing URLs in individual posts, so for now the no-follow/do-follow is all or nothing. The idea of selectively applying it to comments is more to encourage quality comments than it is to discourage spam.

Kirk, you are giving me some insight into how do-follow works. Interesting that you can set a time for no-follow to be applied, then remove it.

By: Patrix

Patrix — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:47:00 +0000

Comment spam is now (almost) history and trackback spam is big now especially from those feed aggregator sites. I delete 1-2 everyday from my relatively unknown site. They also look more authentic than comment spam. I wonder if our blogs/sites are hurt when such link farms link back. Or is it better since they are inbound links?

By: Kirk M

Kirk M — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:59:24 +0000

I started using the Do-Follow plugin about a month ago and have it set for two days before taking the No-Follow tag off a comment for anti spam purposes. I use Akismet, Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behavior to watch over my property as it were so I haven’t experienced any increase in Spamments because of the plugin.

Whether it’s an asset or detriment to my PR remains to be seen but I do like the idea of giving back something to the people who take the time to comment on a post. Plus I believe that it really depends on what type of blog you have as to whether out-linking is going to help your rank or not. A popular, personal type blog shouldn’t have to worry about it as much as a popular niche type blog that may find that out-links to unrelated content might not be such a great thing in the long run.

In the end it might just boil down to personal preference. I agree with the idea that a future version of Wordpress should have the added function of turning the no-follow tag on/off for any particular comment.

By: Discover Doug » Archives » rel=nofollow pros and cons

Discover Doug » Archives » rel=nofollow pros and cons — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:55:18 +0000

[...] recently ran across another article about whether to use rel=nofollow in links from your visitors comments. Jonathan, the author, advocates installing the Dofollow Plugin For WordPress, which removes the [...]

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:38:00 +0000

@Mostly Technical (I hope you thanked your parents for giving you that name)- solutions do exist for selective nofollow by adding /follow/ to the end of a url.
As for the pagerank leaks, there are so many variations of what you can do, and I have probably written in excess of 30 posts on various problems and associated solutions on blogs. The more you micro-manage things, ultimately things become more time consuming.

By: Mostly Technical

Mostly Technical — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:17:10 +0000

By the way, does anyone know how outgoing links from comments affect PR? Since out-going links are good, it seems to me that letting your commenters do that for you is good - as long as they link to a related site. That is the one fly in the ointment - allowing visitors to link to sites with unrelated content. Yet another reason to have comment-by-comment control over follow vs. no-follow.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:13:10 +0000

Elliot, people who leave comments are also “linkerati” and potential subscribers. How many “quality” links does that plugin of yours gain you?

By: Mostly Technical

Mostly Technical — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:06:46 +0000

Interesting discussion. I discovered the existence of the nofollow attribute a month or two ago, and had mixed feelings about it at the time. In the end I concluded that the Rel=Nofollow tag will eventually reduce spam. Then again, the bots are blind, and akismet does work well, so in the end, perhaps the tag won’t do much against spam. Besides, spammers spam by numbers, and even if the spam does not increase the PR of their website, it probably drives just a little traffic, so the spammers will keep right on spamming.

What rel=nofollow may do is increase the quality of comments. Pande is right, some people comment just for the sake of leaving a link.

Here are a couple of ideas about that.

1) If I get a comment like “nice post” and that’s all, I delete it, no apologies.

2) How about a plugin that allows the blog operator to select which comments get to be followed, and which ones not? If I had a plugin like that, I would reward useful comments with a real contribution with a “publish with follow” and the pot-boilers as “publish no-follow”. And I would be quite happy to publicly flag which was which. That would encourage quality comments!