I've just finished writing an article for my new website promoting the removal of NoFollow from your Wordpress blogs. Feedback (and I'm sure plenty of differing opinions) are welcome. 1. Not Deceiving your readers. People say the 'website' field and want to drop a link to the website, but they're unaware that they're not even getting the full-weight of a proper link. Why? No idea, but I think the next step is removing the entire website field from wordpress. 2. More comments. This one should probably be number 1 on the last, but thankfully it's in no particular order. You get more comments. 3. Providing an incentive to your readers. Really, the people who argue that DoFollow blogs promote more spam have clearly never tried them. I receive just as many spam comments on my NoFollow platforms as I do on my DoFollow platforms. 4. Blogging is about a community. Help your neighbours! Seriously. The entire concept of blogging is about to build relationships with fellow bloggers. 5. NoFollow does not discern between spammers and commenters. So, 1/5 of your comments are spam. Well, 4/5 are good comments, and probably deserve the link-love! You're penalizing everyone for a problem that only affects a percentage of your readers! 6. Spam filters are more effective. Spam sucks - we all know it. Does NoFollow solve the problem? No, not at all. Hit up Sixapart for a guide on spam filtering. 7. Because Matt Mullenweg said so. For those that don't know, Matt Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress. Here's what he had to say: 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. Top 7 Reasons for DoFollow
I think the way wordpress and others have approached this is just retarded. First, one of the worst things I have seen that has been around for a long time is putting the name of the commentor as the link url anchor text! Usernames should not be associated with websites! Please wordpress give the website field it's own text area or just put the url on its own! Further, if spam was really their concern they should have come up with ways to stop spam. I can think of dozens. Forums have been much more intelligent with regards to this. Options include: - Having users register to post with a minimum number of posts before a link can be placed. - Having all posts filtered until a certain number of posts from that user have been approved. - Having a (this is spam) button next to each post so other users can say it is spam and have it removed automatically if the count reaches, say, 5. - Any other method you can think of that is better than the current. Basically the reason so many blogs rolled with the nofollow is because google said so. Google thought most blogs are worthless and didn't want to spend resources having to crawl them. So basically Google dictated what is important and what is garbage. Any time an easy solution is implemented over a truly innovative one it will always be a partial fix to the problem.
there isnt any competition left, since the nofollow term was introduced by google. bu yeahh im agreed by that blogging is just about building relations with fellow bloggers and help each others.
I use an extension for FF known as SEOQuake, which puts a strikeout through nofollow links. However, it's unnecessary and I only have it installed for other reasons - you can simply just hit View > Source, and see if the link looks like <a href="website" <i>rel="nofollow"</i> This is actually something I hadn't even thought of. Now that you do bring it to my attention though, that really is stupid, and also adds to the workload of webmasters who have to filter out anchor text from their comments! Exactly right. There are plenty of different spam-prevention measures for Wordpress that you can take. Of course, bundling WP with Akismet was a good start.