Did you know that all links in blog comments have by default the nofollow attribute? This means that if you leave a comment on a blog and put your link in the signature, that link does not count for search engines ratings. It was set like this to prevent comment spam on blogs. But now, at least for Wordpress blogs, this nofollow attribute becomes useless, thanks to the great Akismet plugin. Akismet saved this blog in 7 months time of almost 2000 spam comments. So why do we still need the nofollow?
Actually we don’t, and today, via CosminPTR, a very young but interesting blog, centered on working from home, I found out how to change this. The yesfollow project was created
to give bloggers, commenters and forum participants the credit they deserve. The blogosphere provides some of the most useful content on the web, but due to the pervasive use of the “nofollow” attribute, most blogosphere contributors don’t get search engine credit for their comments and discussions. The yesfollow Project aims to change that.
How to disable nofollow
The yesfollow project teaches us how to do it:
Disable “rel=nofollow” on your blog. You can install a plugin which removes the “nofollow” tag from your blog, or disable the plugin which adds it. For Wordpress 1.5+, install the DoFollow plugin. For Movable Type, disable the nofollow plugin.
I just activated the DoFollow plugin on this blog, so from now on, when you leave a comment on any of AllTipsAndTricks posts you’ll get credit from the search engines for that link. So, come on my friends, DoFollow me!
12 Comments
Congratulations on joining the dofollow community I sugges you look at bumpzee group and get your blog listed as you will receive lots of linkbacks. I believe you will see an increase in traffic soon.
Thank you so much for the tip. I’m going to check it right away!
Simonne, if you search at google with “site:www.alltipsandtricks.com/blog *** -view”
you can see that you have too many supplemental pages. I suggest you add more content to those pages or try adding different description and keywords meta tags to those pages.
Thank you, Unluler, for telling me that. I’m in the process of updating old pages, so many of them have still the default description and keywords meta tags. I’ll try to fix them as soon as I can.
Great article ! Compliments from a Dutch guy
Kudos - We’ve just done the same.
It would be better if there was more monitoring of the blog replies with or without nofollow. Now I find so many replies on blogging pages in general of witch I think what is the added value of this?
Hi Frits! The added value is that now people who take their time to give my their input to my ideas, get a small reward, a backlink from a page which in time will earn a better PR
I think the point about the quality of comments that people would be inclined to make is true. I think this is particularly relevant to less established bloggers. They would be far more inclined to take the time to make a proper post rather than just a couple of lines if they feel that they are gaining some value in return for their input.
I feel a far better approach is to simply allow or disallow comments on an individual basis rather than just downgrading them all.
Hey Sean, from my experience, I can tell you that I get the same amount of crappy comments as I did before removing the no-follow. But my blog doesn’t have such a high PR, so perhaps it is not very attractive for comment spammers. I agree with you, I don’t want to act as consequence of evil, I just want to maintain what I think it’s good for my readers.
How did you decided on the DoFollow plug-in, when compared to all the different wordpress plugins out there that do the same job?
I’m looking at doing this for my blog now, and am struggle to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of anti-nofollow plugins.
Colin, I adopted DoFollow very early, so as far as I remember now, that was the only available plugin at that time. It didn’t mess up any other things on my blogs, so I stayed with it. Even on Wordpress 2.3.1 it is working smoothly.