Inspired by Tino Triste, I have decided to remove the rel=”nofollow” tag from the comments links in this blog, to reward people who leave relevant comments.
The world wide web was designed precisely to to be made out of of sites linking to each other and this principle is used to determine the strength, relevancy, and popularity of a site by Google’s page rank algorithm. Then due to blog comment spammers and robots, Google and other search engines decided to introduce the rel=”nofollow” tag, which basically means that a link with that tag has no weight for search engine rankings at all. Wikipedia took up this option readily, and unfortunately so did WordPress in the default state. But comment spam did not decrease significantly, in fact it has probably increased regardless, so it seems unnecessary to penalise the genuine comments, or for that matter the useful external references on Wikipedia.
So I switched it off.
How? I thought I could just edit the comment module of the theme but it’s embedded far more deeply than that. So I used Kimmo Suominen‘s DoFollow 3.0 plugin
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter
Interesting. I just read a posting yesterday (Sorry don’t have the link to it!) that said Google was penalizing “link exchanges” (i.e., I link to you and You link to me). The writer was suggesting three ways to get around the penalty. (i.e., A2B, B2C, and C2A). For those of us who don’t care about Google and where in the results we fall out (i.e., if you’re not in the top two answers in a search, then who cares). Any way, I just wanted to point out that LinkLove may have unintended consequences. Like the three thermodynamics laws, (ya can’t win; ya can’t break even; and ya can’t quit), you can’t avoid the negative unintended consequences. Unless you don’t care!
I have had the nofollow tag removed for a long time on my blogs.
Cheers Andy, I’m glad to know that my post has inpired you to do the same. Thanks for the link too, I’ll give you some social love.
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