Find Jeff and Susan

I had no idea when I started this blog what the nofollow attribute even was or why it was important until I started checking back links to the site.  Like many other bloggers, I thought if I set out into the blogosphere, read other blogs and make insightful and useful comments that I’d get a back link which would help my page ranking with search engines.  I was wrong and I had no idea just how wrong I was until I started reading about the nofollow tag.

I first learned about the nofollow attribute when I checked my strategy of signing up and submitting  internet articles to various sites such as eHow, associated content and similar sites.  In the profile pages of these sites, they let you put your blog url and you can even put your url in the article itself.  One right-click, view page source and i’m looking at a tag right before my url that says “nofollow”.  Hmmm – quick google search and there’s a lengthy discussion of the implementation of a nofollow attribute, intended to discourage spam comments.  Apparently it’s other suggested use by Google is when users submit links, to avoid association with “unknown” content, the nofollow tag is encouraged.  So basically, my efforts of trying to get some page rank by submitting content to third party sites was nil.

Bloggers have been told repeatedly that making comments on other blogs is a sound strategy for receiving page rank by back links but the nofollow tag essentially removes any page ranking criteria from the link.  Google states that the bots don’t follow the tags and apparently Yahoo disregards the tag although there’s only one search engine that I care about and that’s Google.  The traffic from other engines pales in comparison so the campaign of back linking by comment is worthless if the blog in question uses the default setting of nofollow for comments (ie WordPress).

Let’s talk a little about comment spam – I hate it and so does everyone else but the fact of the matter is that Askimet does a great job of catching it.  Since I started this blog, Askimet has caught 1,902 spam comments and I have 5,53 in my spam que.  There are no spam comments on my site unless I intentionally let them in and frankly, I’m not bothered by this issue.  According to WordPress, the nofollow attribute did nothing to stop comment spam (yet has continued to leave nofollow as the default setting.)

What I have done about this nofollow issue

Since I was completely unaware that the nofollow comment attribute was on my site I disabled it.  I believe that if you leave a comment on this site you should have a back link.  That’s the way I want it on sites I comment on.  Comments are useful in many ways – they’re user contributed content that can help by adding keywords and help to make a site feel more like a community than a one-sided conversation.  So I installed a WordPress Plugin called Dofollow.  A moment later, the “evil nofollow attribute from your comments” is removed.  Will this result in more spam comments – I don’t really care since the Askimet plugin is catching them anyway.

About Comment Etiquette

When I go to a blog and make a comment, I actually read the post and try to add something intelligent to the mix.  A comment like “Great Article!”  isn’t really a comment, is it?  Yes it may take a few more minutes to actually read and say something useful but those kinds of comments are more likely to be clicked on by other readers than an obvious spam comment for the sole purpose of back linking.  The other thing in comment etiquette that you shouldn’t use your url in the name field – a) Askimet flags that as spam so I have to override it and b) you’re already getting a link, no need to be greedy.  I sometimes let these through but I’m just going to let Askimet kill them from now on.

With that said, please feel free to comment and get a back link that might actually contribute to your overall page ranking since the nofollow tag is gone here.