What is “nofollow” and why you should disable it
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Sometimes I do some blog hopping and I find a lot of good blogs out there. So I try to follow what they are doing in the hope of increasing my money from blogging. Lately I have noticed a lot of “U Comment I follow” sign. It is only now that I have discovered what they really meant.
“U Comment I follow” basically means is that if you place a comment in a blog whcih bears such sign, the search engines will follow the links placed by the commentor resulting in a back link to the commentor’s blog.
There are search engines (Like Google) who alleged that they do not follow the links in the comments. Some say that this is not true because of a test done. Other less popular search engines (like yahoo, msn etc.) say they treat the links as if it is any other link. No matter what they say, one thing is clear, disabling the “No follow” will both be advantagous to the owner of the blog and the commentor.
So what does “Nofollow” really mean? Google started out this controversy. They noticed that spammers are busy commenting on blogs so that they could a lot of back links (Take note that back links help boost a blog or website’s search engine ranking) To prevent spammers from manipulating the search engine rankings, and to eventually stop spamming, Google started to implement the “nofollow” policy when it comes to comments. This move then became popular with other search engines.
Did they succeed ? Well spammers still spam. In fact the spam problem is much worse now than ever before. Word Press founder Matt Mullenweg has this to say about the failure of “No follow” - “In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.”
With that in mind it makes no sense to continue to allow “nofollow” considering that it has no effect. (This is enabled by default) Spam filters are much more better in doing the job than continuing to allow “nofollow”. Sadly, “no-follow” punishes the commentor with legitimate and sensible comments. As one blogger nicely says it “PUNISH SPAMMERS, NOT BLOGGERS.”
March 22nd, 2008 - Posted in Blogging | |
2 Responses to ' What is “nofollow” and why you should disable it '
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on March 22nd, 2008 at 7:01 am
[...] like Google and Yahoo. …US Core Search Rankings, February 2008 ClickZ Newswww.firstcoastnews.comWhat is ???nofollow??? and why you should disable itby Zigfred Diaz Sometimes I do some blog hopping and I find a lot of good blogs out there. So I try [...]
on March 22nd, 2008 at 9:48 am
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]