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DoFollow Plugin Activated On Marketing Results Blog

April 13, 2007 on 10:14 pm | In Blogging | 8 Comments

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One well-meaning but ultimately futile feature of the WordPress blog platform is the mandatory addition of the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links within all comments.

From the Wikipedia entry “nofollow”:

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of spamdexing, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and MSN search engines also respect this tag.

rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.”

Why nofollow is silly

Much has been said about why nofollow is silly, including this seminal post. I agree. For starters, comment spam is absolutely rife [11,009 spam comments gobbled up by Akismet since installing it around 2 months ago].Â nofollow doesn’t work.

Nofollow Deactivated On This Blog

I have just installed the DoFollow Plugin which deactivates the default nofollow setting within comments in WordPress.

What this means is, if you comment in even a half sensible way on this blog, your comment will contribute toward the search engine rankings of your site!

Will

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Well, you learn something new everyday – great tip Will. Does that qualify as a half-sensible comment?

Comment by rockoyster — April 14, 2007 #
Hehehe, yes you’re safe Graham. It will be interesting to see if comment numbers go up as a result.

Comment by Will — April 14, 2007 #
Auto Body Parts Michigan…

In the light of the discharge tore through his frame, racking it with one….

Trackback by Auto Body Parts Michigan — July 23, 2007 #
Will, I agree. Most of the comment spam gets caught by akismet. And even if it didn’t, most people turn on comment moderation to make sure that comments are, as you say, half-sensible.

So why nofollowing? I just didnt know where to get the plugin, thanks for the tip.

btw: where do you get the Spam protection plugin you have down here? that makes me calculate a simple sum?

Thanks!

Comment by Jane G. — January 29, 2008 #
The nofollow tag is a great little bit of code. I get a lot of spammers on my blog daily and this attribute in my code helps with the ranking of the page the comment is on. No leaky parts here!

Comment by Wesley - Muscle Building Blogger — February 8, 2008 #
Since you support the dofollow, you should get the dofollow icon posted somewhere on your site. ; )

Comment by support dofollow blogs — February 28, 2008 #
What is the affect of disabled ‘NoFollow’ on a blog site? Doesn’t the out going links diminish the Google PR rating of the page? Don’t get me wrong, I like the ‘dofollow’ but want to make sure I understand all the ramifications.

Comment by Soy Candles — April 12, 2009 #
Hi Will,

I’m glad you are now a”Do Follow”blog. It is amazing how many blogs or websites are listed under do follow and yet their links are no follow. Why would they engage in this kind of deception? Or did they change their mind without letting anybody know?

Anyway, perhaps their intention is to be do follow and if the default in WP is no follow they just don’t realize that. I didn’t. But I just started my blog. I’m happy to have discovered yours. It seems to be a fountain of helpful stuff. Your picture seems familiar but I have no clue why.

Please keep up your good work. You are sure helping a lot of people to make sense out of things.

Comment by Vance — August 8, 2009 #