Spreading some link love
The rel="nofollow" attribute on HTML anchors was supposed to help prevent comment spam. Unfortunately, as Michael Hampton explains at length, NoFollow hasn’t worked - at least not based on the volume of comment spam that Akismet has removed since I moved to WordPress (142949 spam comments detected as you read this post).
Randa Clay has created an alternative - the I Follow Movement - sites that acknowledge the contribution that commenting makes to the blogoshere (avoiding the need to specifically add links to a blogroll in order to spread some link love). I figure that if NoFollow is not preventing comment spam, the least I can do is let the information people leave here in comments work for them in the search engines (at the risk that a few spam comments will still make it through).
Following Owen’s example, I’ve implemented the DoFollow WordPress plug-in on this site so URLs in comments will now (hopefully) be picked up by the Googlebot, Slurp, MSNbot, Teoma and others. Incidentally, if I specifically add rel="nofollow" to a link, it still works - so it’s still possible to block links that you really don’t want the bots to follow (robots.txt directives are unaffected too).
So, please, comment away - and consider doing the same on your site.
Posted: 0:22 on Monday 16 July 2007 under Blogging, Site notices.
Comments: 5
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Pingback from Mark’s (we)Blog » Mark’s (we)Blog 2.0
Time: Wednesday 29 August 2007, 21:33
[…] Denis de Bernardy’s Do Follow. […]
Comment from MSN hacken
Time: Saturday 22 March 2008, 18:35
There are a few reasons that bloggers are following the links of their commenters. I am curious about your reason why you are being following links of your loyal visitors and commenters? Because you want to reward them or do you hate NoFollow?
Comment from George Lindemann Jr
Time: Tuesday 25 March 2008, 3:56
The NoNoFollow movement is a great way to increase blog participation at the end of the day if you want to leave a comment the last thing you want is for it to be moderated by some backdoor piece of code. I for one have implemented the DoFollow plugin on my blogs and hope more people do so in the future.
Comment from Dale Rose
Time: Thursday 26 June 2008, 2:35
Mark-Here’s what I don’t understand. Why is that when someone creates a blog, as I am about to do, they have to search around for a plugin that will turn comments from nofollow to dofollow. Most people who are just starting out don’t know anything about follow/nofollow. I think that wordpress should be designed with a simple button you click to decide whether comments are follow or no follow. You shouldn’t have to go find a plugin. Also, on blogger blogs I don’t think there are plugins so you are just stuck with the nofollow.
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Please note the rules for comments and the privacy policy and data protection notice. I'm sorry but, because not everyone sticks to the rules, I've had to implement some spam prevention measures - if you're experiencing difficulties leaving a comment, please let me know.