NoFollow Just Isn’t Cool
I understand why Google wants us to nofollow tag all of the comments on our blogs.
Comment spam is crappy -true. It’s a nuisance and an eyesore -true. Add to that the weight and importance Google places on links in their ranking algo… It’s no wonder Google perceives comment spam as such a problem.
I got it.
Now, here’s the problem - and mind you, this isn’t anything that hasn’t already been said by people a lot smarter than me. The problem is, slapping a nofollow tag on somebody’s link when they’ve taken the time and effort to make a thoughtful and compelling remark or comment on your blog or site, just isn’t cool.
What does it say?
Does it say; ‘Hey, thanks for being a contributor to my site and helping to develop a great discourse about the topic to everybody’s betterment!‘?
Not exactly. It’s more like; ‘thank you drive thru‘ - it’s not even that nice. More accurately, nofollow - in my mind at least - says;
‘You left a comment. I would love to acknowledge your existence, but you might be a spammer. Since you might be a spammer, I better not link to you. Google doesn’t like spammers and… you know, you’re either with Google or you’re against them. So, I can’t really, you know, risk it.’
Well, here’s a newsflash for you: that sucks.
The Internet, is about links. Links are why Google is good -remember? Links make the algo hum and the results relevant (to some extent at least). That’s great and I appreciate Google for their work. That said, if the links are abused and somehow manipulated to leverage some advantage in Google… why is that any body’s problem but Google’s?
Why all of a sudden do we have to start being rude (and yes, nofollow is rude) to people who have shown us courtesy by leaving us a comment? I’m from the South. I guess maybe I’m hypersensitive to rudeness - but that’s how I see it.
And before I get too carried away with a Google rant, I’ll say this too: It’s webmaster’s fault too. That’s right. It’s your fault too Mr. Blogger guy. Google doesn’t want comment spam so you just throw your collective hands in the air and say;
‘oh well, I guess I’ll just have to throw a nofollow on everything then’.
And why is that exactly? What, because you couldn’t possibly be expected to actually keep an eye on your comments and junk the junk and trash the trash. No way. That’s crazytalk. Blasphemy.
Why not? Oh let me guess, because then you wouldn’t possibly have time to maintain and update the 625 blogs you have to maintain to keep that adsense money rolling in. I’m looking at you dirty again too, Google.
So spam comments and spam blogs and MFA (made for adsense) sites are all bad and crappy and they pollute the web. But the best way to combat this - the only real solution - is to say I have to be rude and nofollow everybody that leaves a comment on my blog.
Whatever. I call shenanigans on that one.
So here’s what I’m gonna do about it. From now on, anybody that leaves me a comment on the blog is going to have the nofollow tag on their url removed. If I could put an extrafollow tag on there, I would. I’m going to do the same for comments on WebProNews articles as a matter of fact.
Crazytalk you say? Feh! I can do this no problem because I actually READ the comments. I will delete bad/trashy comments but I won’t make everybody pay for the fact that some people are spamming. If I miss one, I’m confident that people will email (mike@webpronews.com)me and let me know — — that’s right I’ll even put an email address in public places.
Now, the actual links in the body of your comments will still be nofollowed. After all, you might be a really clever spammer and Google doesn’t like spammers. And you know, you’re either with them or against them and all that…
I absolutely agree Mike.
Absolutely, comments are the life blood of the blogger. Without a check letting us know that our work is appreciated by someone, a comment is our validation that the work is appreciated.
Thanks for making the point. Though getting digged is pretty darn sweet too.
Google is always changing this is an interesting article too thanks
The problem is you get people leaving worthless comments that add no value such as “I agree”. Is it spam, or is it someone that genuinely agrees? Does it matter? It still adds nothing to the dialog.
For what it’s worth I run a number of forums (remember those? the original ’social networks’, well, after Usenet and IRC that is), and ALL signature links on registered members are follow enabled, they are on the one small blog I run too. If that dilutes whatever crumb of ranking from their feast the almighty Google chooses to grant this lowly peasant then so be it, it is the *RIGHT* way to treat users who add value to my site. Those that don’t I can handle personally.
Oh look, no URL, maybe this post adds no value either but at least it isn’t a lame attempt to get a link for typing two generic words
Oh I remember Forums… I admin WebProWorld.com currently. — I don’t nofollow signature links there either.
If somebody agrees, they agree. If that’s all they ever add to any thread, that’s different and maybe then you handle it…
All I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s cool to lump everybody in the same bucket by default.
I think most people that use blogs have no idea about it or have no idea what SEO is. Blame wordpress which automatically has nofollow set up - it’s intimidating for a new blogger to change this because they have to actually modify the code (to my knowledge wordpress doesn’t have a default option to enable or disable it, you have to either modify it yourself or install an additional modification that will do it for you).
Maybe we need a plugin then… It’s not a hard fix, but I see where you’re coming from.
Apparently there already is a plugin for this » dofollow
I haven’t tested it yet, but the code looks like it will do the job.
I think you just need to change the line:
to:
but I could be wrong.
You know, I can’t agree more. I was recently looking through Technorati’s panel of links to my site, and a few popped up labeled as coming from a nofollow plugin. (Which did beg the question about why they registered…but I’m not really knowledgeable about that stuff.) That’s a real downer. The trust just isn’t there. Punishes everyone because some yahoos out there spam like there’s no tomorrow.
It would be nice if everybody would do this. A good webmaster can get rid of the spam
Spam can be automated. Spam REMOVAL is harder. If you say “Webmasters should bear the burden of removing spam from their site”, then either you are telling people that it is their fault for not keeping a clean blog (what was that about rudeness?), or you are obliging people to use blogging software that has some sort of built-in spam removal tool.
Man, all you whiny blog whores make me ill. “Wah… Wah… Wah…” Go back to writing your self indulgent “Look at me, I’m important” drivel nobody gives a crap about.
I agree with your message, but felt compelled to let you know that this is one of the most badly written “professional” articles I’ve ever seen.
Well, technically, it was just a quickie-style blog entry… I wasn’t chasing a Pulitzer with it or anything.
Still, consider me sufficiently humbled and appropriately ashamed of myself for not living up to the high quality standards we’ve come to expect from the blogosphere…
Fantastic idea, if only all the big blogs that have very useful and interesting comments would reward their users Google would be even more beneficial!
Link backs are just one of the things that Google is looking at right?
Good read.
That’s a pretty bold move - I like it.
I’m especially amused with ” you’re either with Google or you’re against them” - that’s unfortunately pretty accurate these days. Don’t forget that you can’t buy links either (unless you buy them from Google).
Kudos on taking this stand.
Movable Type 4 (currently in beta) has a checkbox in the preferences that allows you to turn off no-follow for trusted (registered) commenters, but leave it on for others.
Visitors can then externally authenticate with OpenID,TypeKey, etc., or with MT4’s new member registration feature.
I agree - there should be levels of trust assigned to commenters. Unauthenticated users are more likely to be bots (and have nofollow on their links) whilst those registered with my site get the full link functionality.
OpenID raises interesting questions. I’ve not yet seen spam bots that use OpenID but I bet they won’t be far behind if this becomes accepted practice. Maybe a 3rd party could then rate OpenID users for their signal/noise ratio.
As an aside, this article is a great way to get lots of comments on your blog!
Well said - I’ve removed the nofollows from the sites I run based on your reasoning.
I understand the application in places like Wikipedia, but for blog comments I’m less sure. Captchas do a reasonable job of filtering out the scripts, so that leaves just the odd human posts to moderate or delete. Scripts send spam comments hundreds at a time, but humans work at a more reasonable speed.
I think if someone is allowing dofollow on his comments, then he should make visitors know about it, either by a clear notification/image that tells so.
What you say makes sense.. It is like Google is having us to do the work for them.
I have zero nofollows on my site and forums because I’ve always thought that to be insulting when my comments are nofollow.
Except that links in comments aren’t the traditional, manually placed links that formed the web. They’re automated, which means any idiot with a website can get a high pagerank when no -human- has deemed them credible.
If their comment was worth anything at all, you can put them on your blogroll. Manually.
I agree 100%. I encourage anyone who does away with NoFollow to add this logo to their site to let folks know. It’s crazy to rob contributors to your site content with the opportunity to share who they are and where they’re from. NoFollow is a waste of time on sites with manually-approved comments like mine. Logo can be grabbed here:
http://chuckbrown.com/no-nofollow-logo.html
You’re dead on. The solution to spam is not to blacklist individual spammers but to whitelist known good senders. Nofollow links are an insult to those that comment and contribute to intelligent discussion.
Very nice article, I hate nofollow.
I think you’re overly vilifying NoFollow. It isn’t rude, it’s simply a way of sending a message to search engines (yes, that’s all it is–a message to search engines) telling them that they shouldn’t treat this link the same as links posted by the owner of the website. It’s just a hint to them to aid their decision about whether the link is spam or not.
Regardless, comments in blogs shouldn’t be about improving search engine rankings for the commenters. They should be about furthering the discussion prompted by the blog entry. NoFollow is a way of removing any doubt that is what is happening.
Visitors reading the comments can still click the NoFollow-ed links to learn more about the person posting _if_ they think the comment is insightful. That small amount of extra publicity seems plenty compensation for a
Very True!!
While I do understand the spirit of this post, I know that on my own personal site I nofollowed all user profile website links because 99% of them were spam and there are very few plugins or automated ways to verify good links. Comment spam is one issue and I do let users who contribute get link love, but some links almost “need” to be nofollowed by default.
Hear hear! As soon as we throw up our hands and try to automate everything, the bots win. By actually READING comments, and making a judgement call as to whether they’re spam or legit, we maintain our “human edge”.
Andy Beard runs an excellent community at Bumpzee.com called No “No Follow” where people rebelling against No Follow are uniting. If enough people were to join in, why couldn’t we take this argument directly to WordPress? NoFollow has its place, maybe in sidebars, but not in comments! Revolution!
Anyway, I used bumpzee’s link instead of mine if you want to join.
There are open protocol black lists that applications can check to see if a message is spam. Spampal + Thunderbird catches about 95% of the spam I receive (about 300 messages a day). Is there something equivalent for sites?
Good read. I think the best option is to have moderation set for all comments and to only approve the ones that contains no spam. By the way, I read an article a while back about how the various engines implement nofollow, and I think it’s only google that really cares about that attribute, if I remember correctly.
This is very small minded of you. Think beyond your own selfish thoughts. The more backlinks spammers get, the higher the rankings they will get for spammy sites, making it harder for people to find what they really want.
Disagree, sorry. At the end of the day it’s not about quantity OR quality of links, it’s about relevance. I could take 3 hours to sit down and analyze every angle of your post and leave the most insightful comment ever written, but that doesn’t make my site any more relevant to the topic of SEO or nofollow than a spammer’s online poker site. Google isn’t built to search out and reward the most honest and hard working commenters, it’s built to give a searcher results that are relevant to the search query. If taking out the nofollow tag and moderating your comments closely makes you feel warm and fuzzy then so be it, but don’t make yourself out to be a hero because you’re not helping the overall accuracy of search. You’re just helping one small segment of the internet community (good commenters) to rank higher in the SERPs.
The way it should work is that commenters leave a nofollowed link in their signature, readers make the judgment about the relevance, and if they are so inclined they go check out the site. If they like the site and have a relevant reason to link to it on their own site or blog, then they do and THAT is when the link gets rewarded because now it actually is relevant to the content on the linking page.
Just my opinion, not trying to offend you. Good post regardless, I dugg it.
1.) “nofollow” is not a TAG, it is an ATTRIBUTE.
2.) Automatic insertion of the “nofollow” attribute is a choice made by users/developers of blogs and CMS systems, not “evil Google.” Maybe you should redirect your anger from Google to WordPress, etc.
Heck, maybe you should even try thanking Google for introducing an attribute which is very relevant and helpful when used correctly. It is bad when anything is used incorrectly - but that doesn’t mean we should eliminate using it.
If bloggers are moderating their comments, then why not just remove the “nofollow” from comments templates and stop complaining? Also, as Nernie said, the purpose of blog comments is not to increase search engine results for other sites…
/rant
I agree with you completely and have planned to remove the nofollow tag on the web links but leave them intact for the actual comment body… Good call man…
Total agree. I even went a step further and wrote a WordPress plugin, BlogFollow that will grap a snippet from a commenter’s blog and display it below their comment.
About time someone said it…
[…] Anyway, the above expository rant was provoked by this particular post on Digg: NoFollow Just Isn’t Cool. Allegedly written by an SEO schiester, it details why this comment spam deterrent is “unfair,” citing a bizarre interpretation of the nature of free speech, and an even more bizarre interpretation of when reciprocity is expected. […]
Amen! It is just laziness for most people. I will be rolling out some new things to my site, and one of them will be microformats rel tags that give detailed information on the user (from my perspective). This will entail moderation on my part, and flagging some as friends, others as foes - but I think it is much better to moderate versus throwing the baby out with the bath water.
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Seriously, as much as I hate spam, I hate the nofollow rule for comments even more. I do see value in using it though. It comes in handy to avoid having print versions of my posts being indexed by Google, and it’s certainly helpful for those times when you want to link somebody you can’t STAND in a post, who dropped a bomb of an article that was so grotesque that you just HAD to link it just to show others what a crazy man he was, but you don’t want that bastard blogger enjoying the benefits of a linkback. I speak only hypothetically though, of course.
[…] NoFollow Just Isn’t Cool - WebProNews Blog Please note: I do not use NoFollow. (tags: google, pagerank, blogs) […]
I’m not sure if you’ve seen it, but there have been a few test recently that are reporting that nofollow anchor text is counting, but not as much as an anchor text link without nofollow.
There’s a firefox plugin that automatically highlights nofollow links, which is very helpful.
I totally agree–I don’t have nofollow on my blog and don’t think nofollow is necessary. If you want people to comment, then you need to make sure you have nofollow off.
Bill have they seen it count in Google or in MSN/Yahoo? I have seen all three spiders crawl through nofollow links, but not sure on them being “counted”.
The testing that went on included some “made up” words used both on a link with nofollow and a link without nofollow. Both the nofollow anchor text contributed to rankings as well as the ones without nofollow.
So, the nofollow anchor text counts, but just not as much as it does without nofollow.
[…because then you wouldn’t possibly have time to maintain and update the 625 blogs you have to maintain to keep that adsense money rolling in. I’m looking at you dirty again too, Google…] Very well said Mike. This is the major problem with many of the bloggers, they own too much blogs, hence unable to manage them personally.
So having had my community pimped by Tinu (thanks Tinu) when are you going to apply
As it happens the SEO community on Bumpzee has a lot of potential, it just needs to have a few SEO sites with leverage give it some airtime.
I think nofollow just only a tag which serviced for google. It’s no use to any bloggers. I’m planing to remove nofollow tag of a blog too.
I just want to say thank You for the great point you make about google, they change so much it can drive a blogger like myself crazy trying to keep up. Please keep us all up to the task as I know you will..I too have a blog that would love some comments on If you ever get the chance I’d so value your remarks and comment’s on making better.
http://cre8asite.blogspot.com
I’m glad we are opening our eyes and realize that this nofollow thing really sucks, It is not our fault that WordPress or Search engines are unable to deal with spammers.
Just use captchas, or skill testing questions. They take too long for spammers, and they can’t be automated. That should limit the comments down to an amount that can be moderated. No nofollow necessary.
If remove nofollow, still afraid spam. I used askme, still have a bulk of spam. If removed it, it will more. So i think still need nofollow.
I think most of the script spammers don’t care about nofollow. And we can almost stop these spams using logical questions also called as anti-spam. BTW I don’t think there would be any difference between follow and nofollow for other search engines than Google.
I have installed dofollow plugin on my blog but where can i get that logo that says that i have do follow plugin?
No follow is not a good idea. I suggest everyone shold install no no-follow plugin
Why dont they remove the no follow attribute from wordpress base?
My personal opinion of nofollow is that it is hypocritical in a sense as far as Google is concerned.
In my opinion, a lot of what nofollow does is makes it nearly impossible for new, legit websites to gain rank without having to pay some stupid SEO company to generate links for them (this is unless they are already well connected to the web-design or blogging community and have friends to provide linking).
Google claims to not be a huge fan of paid linking campaigns, yet nofollow forces most new sites to consider that option.
I’ve had a rough time getting Google to rank my new webpage above 0, yet I still refuse to ever pay somebody to link to my site. If becoming involved in worthwhile discussions is what it takes to get my rank up, ill gladly do so, and I probably would have anyways.
I also want to do DoFollow Links in my blog. Thanks for good post!
NoFollow is implemented to stop spammers. But now even good comments are not forthcoming because of NoFollow. I think, because of NoFollow specifically, people now are using other methods to get good inbound links like paying for them.
San
http://www.gurumai.com
I was on the fence for awhile , but I have finally decided to join the ranks of the “I follow group ” It just makes sense to help out other bloggers.
I am also a member of Success University
I hired a guy to setup a blog for me. Among other things, he used nofollow comment settings.
After I figure out that I was using noffolow, I changed it because I expect people to comment sincerely on my blog, so why not give them the fraking link:-) Right?
i think there is a clear potential for abuse of the no follow in both paid and PR channeling.
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Yes..
Its true..
No follow sucks
Yes very true dear. people should be more trusting.
So this site has nofollow or do follow?
yes i tooo hate nofollow tags.. itsjust too cheap
yes i tooo hate nofollow tags.. itsjust too cheap
here is the official forum for it
I hired a guy to setup a blog for me. Among other things, he used nofollow comment settings.
After I figure out that I was using noffolow, I changed it because I expect people to comment sincerely on my blog, so why not give them the fraking link:-) Right?