What is rel='external nofollow'?

WOW! I sure hope you are feeling better now after you let all this steam off!
But I really appreciate your post even maybe next time watch your wording a little bit. (e.g. F***em)
Anyway, have you ever noticed that people recommend almost in every thread when it comes about SEO and how to create traffic and backlinks for a new site, that almost always blog commenting was named?
If you don't want visit or comment on blogs they are meant to make some money so that is one and only up to you but don't damn the ones they try to make a few bucks of their blogs and still posting their ideas and thoughts.
Yes, I fully agree with you, spammers need to be slapped and their comments or links need to be deleted. But don't you agree that even a blog owner who does not have the blog for making money primary, just for him to publish his ideas and thoughts like you name it, that this blog owner would be happy to get meaningful comments on his post, even he is very aware of there is some kind of advantage for the one who left the comment too?
I don't have a blog either and I am very sure I do not comment on blogs to spam, but to create a backlink and I surely appreciate the blogs they do have follow links and you know what? I do enjoy reading any interesting blogs and to let the blog poster know my opinion, my thoughts and my ideas about his post, even the ones with nofollow links. But I do not waste my time on pure commercial blogs, one and only meant to sell their stuff and they do not even have dofollow links anymore.
Now I assume you are a webmaster and I ask you to be honest here...
How did you create all your backlinks??? Can you really say, being 100% honest, you do not have any backlinks from blog comment postings???
Regards
verdecove

 

Yeah, I felt a LOT better after that.

I've got a few other nuggets posted around here similarly.

While generally I try to watch the language, I notice I go all-out on this forum in particular. Sorry.

I realise there are lots of blogs who exist to earn money, but since I rarely if ever visit them (sometimes they may come across in a google search or something), I notice the "good ones" are quite clear on this, which I'm cool with. Therefore they participate in the scratching of backs and the padding of each others' pockets.

But people (those who do not normally consider themselves spammers) do the whole link-spreading-for-money thing on non-commercial blogs and then they cry about the blog owners not letting them profit by posting a comment on the blog. The crying must stop. If I had a blog, I'd force all links to plain text, myself. Those interested in visiting the link will have to do the (not hard) work of copy-pasta in the address bar. 100% spread of information, 0% useful spam.

While I do have a personal website, I wouldn't call myself a webmaster, no. I'm a coder. I build websites that do Something Useful (allow people to place a second home for rent or sale online, allow people to get quotes for/buy vehicle or medical insurance online) along with my colleagues.

So, no blogs, and no backlinks. I'm sure my boss would want backlinks as he's definitely got the spammer genes but we working here in the dredges fight against the pollution of the web by allowing any links to our sites come honestly (we try) from sites whose main topics are the ones I listed above.

In fact recently my boss tried something very dirty: posted on a "people news" site about one of our sites, which was very stupid of him. He was pleased to see it appear in Google a day later, but he completely missed the fact that 100% of the publicity was bad: further comments mentioned that there were other sites that did what we did and were also free (our second home site is not free). But he's one of those people I rant against. He thinks any publicity is good publicity. Really makes steam come out of my ears.

His way of thinking is the reason the web is 99% garbage and 1% decent useful knowledge.

All that said, if I DID have a blog and wanted links, I would likely be posting about something that interests me, and because I was intersted in that topic I'd likely be visiting other blogs who post similar content. If you look around at the big HTML/CSS/web dev sites, there's often a Blog Roll on the side: links to other bloggers who post useful, interesting information, which the particular blog owner believes his/her readers would also be interested in reading because s/he reads them too!

I don't know if those tend to be nofollow or not (I've never checked) but those, along with when someone's blog post is ABOUT someone else's article and links to them, would be the most precious, valuable "back links" I could ever get... because they actually mean something, to me, to the others blogging about The Topic (whatever it may be), and is useful to all who visit, because those who visit are interested in The Topic as well.

If I had a commercial blog... well, then I'd be playing that backlink game and I wouldn't be dicking around with nofollow etc because I'd be doing the you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours... thing anyway.

I do not believe that a blog whose purpose is information should have to allow backlinks to have value, esp if this contributes to spam in the comments, because comment spam destroys sites. It destroyed 90% of what was worthwhile to 456bereastreet, it destroyed Tommy Olsson's site (the autistic cuckoo, which is still offline as far as I know) which had an invaluable page called "The Art Of Reading the DTD" which is now gone...

It is their right to prevent people from grabbing on for backlinks, just as it's the right of a public library to ban all advertising. If they want to promote a new book, they can and do... because they feel the book is worthy, not because they get free copies or paid by the publisher or anything. Imagine if you COULD advertise your book?! Libraries would be full of garbage and nobody would visit them anymore... they'd leave in disgust, seeing that in order to find anything worthwhile, they'd have to shovel through a lot of s*** to get to the gold... and people don't want to do that.

This is why Google et al. work so hard to make search results bring up real content instead of what sales people want... if only sales appeared, Google would become worthless (except for those looking to buy something of course) and people would leave, go to other engines that weed out the spam better.

Spam destroys everything. Semi-spam leads to spam. Self promotion by itself isn't necessarily bad but if you-the-seeker need to weed out self-promotion to get to information you actually seek then it's bad and become SPAM.

Why do we call it spam? Because at the restaurant, everything was a form of spam. And the wife says "BUT I DON'T LIKE SPAM!!!"
When everything's Spam, there's no more food.

 

First of all I need to say now you really did impress me. This post above is a post that is really worth to read and to talk about. I really appreciate the big change in your tone and wording.

I fully respect and understand what you are saying and same as last time I partly agree with you. I do see your points but now I ask you to also see my points and try to understand them a little bit.
I am not a born webdesigner, webmaster or coder. Not a bit.
I designed our shop out of a bad situation of my wife lost her good paid job and maybe our shop to help making up some of the income losses we had to take. So what I did was reading, reading, reading and studying about how to publish a new online store, how to get all those obviously so important backlinks that Google puts so much value in.
Well, like I said in my last post so in whatever forum I read about SEO and backlinks, blog comment posting always was named.
Anyway, where my opinion about creating backlinks and the subject spamming differs from your opinion is, that I look different at the subject spamming in a blog. I am very aware of all those so nice comments like "Nice Post" or "interesting Article" etc and nothing more but maybe "Please visit http://blah blah blah".
Now my friend, that is not what I do. I do leave a relevant and mostly pretty long comment on the post. I do take my time to read the post, to think about and then I take the time to comment on it as it was my own blog.
Yes, since the comment form allows me to add my name and email and my website url I do fill out all those fields and I really appreciate if for my efforts, for my time and my thoughts on that post the link becomes a dofollow link. I don't look at this like scratching each others back or filling each others pockets with money. But maybe you are right and that is what it is but then this is what it has to be like because there are not very many other options of creating backlinks. Except of maybe submitting articles or press releases or hopefully to find related websites they accept a link exchange. Well, the subject link exchange is a subject of it's own as you probably might know yourself. Unfortunately we are not in the lucky situation of having gulps and gulps of money to buy "Valueable" backlinks from high PR sites.
How many people they have a website or online shop like us are in the lucky situation to spend lost of money on getting some backlinks and PR just to show up a little bit higher in the SERP's so the time investment those people had in creating a online shop plus all the other hazzle around, will pay off a little bit at least?
I can't compare myself to a big chain like TARGET or AMAZON or POTTERY BARN etc who have a huge budget every day for advertising. I have to get my traffic, my hopefully someday higher SERP's from hard work, from lots of time we invest and from...backlinks...even if it's from backlinks from blog commenting.
Try to put your feet in my shoes, look at things a little bit from my point of view and you might change your opinion about why a lot of people comment on blogs and would like to have their links to be dofollow links. Simply for the one reason because it is so darn hard to get backlinks at all. I even made bad experiences with article submission even I strictly follow their guidelines.
People take our work of writing a good article for granted and just remove the links. My wife puts a lot of efforts and time in writing articles and it just would be fair for those people they like the article and do put it on their websites to leave the links in at least. But that's not the only problem I have with article submissions. How many article websites just don't care if you submit an article or not? I can see they do receive a lot of articles but then they should shut it off for a few weeks and work the pile up instead of them to let people wait forever for their article to be published, if it ever gets published at all.
Now maybe can you see where I point to, where are some of the big problems of getting those backlinks Google puts so much value in and why some people just don't see any other way anymore than to leave comments on blogs and for them to hope it will be a dofollow link. I completely disagree on how Google handles certain things but they are the King and rule the web. Unfortunately.

Once again thanks for your reply. I'm looking forward to hear from you again and maybe still other users of this forum will join our discussion.
Also feel free to PM me if you like.
Take Care
verdecove

 

it is a very important point made regarding google and the way they value websites. googles ethos is (supposed to be) about giving the user relevant and qulaity content. however it seems if you have enough $$$ you can cheat the system by purchasing high PR backlinks or adwords etc. as a small operation whether it be a blog or an online store, it almost seems as though they can be penalized even if they have good content just because the don't have huge advertising budgets.

 

I fully agree on this. It seems Google cares mainly for the websites with the big budget for advertising.
I was looking into adwords but sorry, the money I would need for ranking good on certain keywords I just don't have to throw it out of the window because not even Google could guarantee me sales. Just think about it, it might take 100+ clicks to maybe get one sale. Gosh, what am I supposed to sell to make that much money up what the other 99 clicks cost me when I have to pay around 1 dollar per click to rank high? I'm trying hard to keep my prices competitive to other shops and not extra high so I maybe can pay for adwords. So yes, I think Google doesn't give much on the small businesses, they try to make a few bucks somehow and quite honest I think actually they even block them getting a bit higher in SERPS and more successful by their Google's "ethics". Maybe someday there will be a search engine that handles things a bit different and in a fair way for every site out on the web, not only for the high dollar paying ones. Until then, Good Luck small blog or online shop owner...work your az off.

 

I ended up in the field by total accident. I used to be a radiographer, and was planning on learning the electrician trade (even though girls don't seem to do that around here, lawlz). Then I became a code nazi.

That's called "fluff posting" or "fluffing." Very little content and is considered a type of spam that hits forums hard, if it's a forum where you need to make x number posts before being able to post links.

Even if those are nofollow, human beings can click on them. There's a web design comic I read, The Brads, where people get a gravitar and can link to their site... and I have clicked on their names, curious what they do with web design. You might like it, it's pretty spot-on most of the time: http://www.bradcolbow.com/

I'm personally uncomfortable with a single company/engine/algorithm determining what information appears where myself. In fact, while I do use Google (and while I find other search engines don't find the things I'm looking for as much, which sends me back to google often), I don't have any "trust" in them.

What I assume and rely on is that, if advertisers get too much of a foothold in search results, the results become skewed enough that they do not return the Most Valuable Information, and that this will cause people to look elsewhere (social media might be able to fill a bit of the hole there but spammers and advertisers have been going in that direction in droves the last year or two... or five). Google does not want people to look elsewhere.

I rely on that to keep them at least somewhat honest. I recently found out that, without telling us (it's on their blog, but who the hell reads Google blogs? SEO people, not the rest of us) that "personalised search" is by default "on" and you have to go find the button to turn it off. Personlised search means, only stuff I've found before turns up with similar searches. This is NOT COOL.
I surf without JS, and it looks like I'm going to have to start searching with cookies from Google blocked and possibly also through a proxy server, as they want to give me "local" results for things which do not have a "local" answer (web design, I do not need Dutch sites, there are not as many of them as english sites).

Back to blog commenting, and I've seen plenty of advice to get into social media for the same purposes (advertising etc), if you are posting a reply on a specialised topic and you leave your url stating "here's something I wrote a few months ago about this very topic" someone's going to read it, which is your goal. To rely on something like the Googles for letting people know you exist is, I think, dangerous anyway. If you're "out there" in the specialised topic you are into people will know you. I recognise possibly most of the bigger names in web design, because it's a sort of community: they link each other, they read each other's stuff, and I've read good information that helped me as a web dev (Dustin Diaz still writes Javascript that's over my head, but once I get ahold on it, it will be invaluable... so even his older stuff is bookmarked). Look how many people know Román Cortés. He just keeps posting this amazing CSS stuff. It's mostly useless, I mean, it's fun stuff, mostly not stuff you'd actually use on a site... but people see it and are like, WOW, I need to send this to my friends on (whatever)!

Re sales: remember that while of course you need people to know your product exists to buy whatever it is you're selling, it also has to be a product people want. If everyone's selling widgets, you're naturally going uphill in a snowstorm if you're also selling widgets. But you know this.

 

Ah that explains it all, don't get too affected by what others do here and there, world is full of quality but also full of scam. Take the first and ignore the other, that's what I'd do to save time

 

most of my blogmates who have high PR use the no follow because they don't want to share their rank to their linkmates...

 

nofollow and external nofollow are same and googlebot don't follow the links marked as nofollow.

 

That's a little lie here. When a link contains the rel="external" attribute that does nothing except notify the browser to open a new window, like target="_blank". The only difference is that rel="external" is xhtml valid, and target="_blank" is not. So "nofollow" and "external nofollow" aren't quite the same thing.

Anyway, the guy has got the answer to his question about 4 years ago, and he's probably no longer subscribed to this thread. Am I wrong to suspect that the search engine of the new vB4 generation of this forum software is pulling results that are old and should be displayed at the bottom of the list rather than at top?...

 

That's make your link not "dofollow" and it's external link (not in your site)

 

Hm update on the whole posting your spammy fluff on a blog:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links
I'm talking about #10.

 

I know this is an old thread,but when i searched for it,I found this.I posted a blog comment on one of the article to get backlinks,but it is showing this next to my profile DP there external no follow after my link.
So does that mean that I need to change anything in my blog to help my SEO or is it just that blog where I posted the comment which is no follow?
Please clear my confusions.

 

sites those contains no follow attribute will not followed by google.

 

Anyway, the value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.

 

search "external nofollow" on google and you will find this topic like me. ^^ but ref=external nofollow is not funny at all. i really hate those bloggers... lol

 

the link will not be count as linking to the web

 

I have put one comment on blog with have external nofollow attribute. Will it help me to improve my search engine ranking?

 

Same stuffs to both No follow and External No follow.

 

in my experience google has shown some 'external nofollow' links in web master tools ,
so i am believing , google does't act it like "nofollow"