No Nofollow!
Tagged as: May 10While reading Rory’s post on hamelife.com (which I enjoyed because it was very interesting plus my blog got a mention!) I continued surfing and happened upon this post about nofollow links.
I doubt that many of you would want to read the wikipedia article explaining what I’m talking about so I will briefly explain. Search engines (Google among them) have an algorithm that uses the amount of links to your website as a part of how to determine the important of your website (this is called your PageRank in the end). This is, in part, what is used to determine how high you are when searches are done.
However to combat people abusing the system, they started to allow you to add an attribute relationship in the links like
<a
href=”http://www.goingthewongway.com/” rel=”nofollow”>goingthewongway<a>
This would then be disregarded in the algorithm to calculate your PageRank. The bottom line is that any links that have that attribute are worth nothing for search engines.
Why is this important?
As a blogger, being read is what’s important! Search engines allow your site to be listed as “more relevant” which could allow more people to find your site and read your content. I don’t write on this blog to understand myself. I write because I like to share my thoughts and get feedback from others. So after reading the article and thinking about it myself, I realized that it definitely encourages more feedback if commenters can get something back. The big popular sites like to do fancy giveaways, but I’m not a big popular site. However, I realized that the least that I could do would be to give anyone who commented a backlink! This helps them because it ever so minutely increases their importance in the eyes of the search engine. And it would hopefully help commenters to have another incentive to leave their thoughts.
Anyways suffice to say I installed the ever so easy to use DoFollow plugin for Wordpress which removes the nofollow attribute for all user-input links (like the website that you list when you leave a comment). Happy nofollow commenting!
Thanks for the link love. Welcome to the ‘club.’ I’ve really taken a role of pied-piper about this topic so please, spread the word.
Thank you very much for the mention, Derek. And I’m so pleased you enjoyed the post.
There’s also a community over at BUMPzee which a few DoFollow-ers have joined. Could be worth checking out.
Thanks, again.
@Dawud Miracle
You are very welcome for the link. Thank you for checking out my blog. And now that I’m more aware of how much the nofollow attribute is used, I will be sure to help others learn about it.
@Rory
Mentioning you in my post is the least that I can do after reading your post. Oh and I must admit that at first I was a little bit skeptical that I would be interested in your entries, but I could not have been more wrong! I’ve read funny, insightful, and just plain interesting posts.
Thanks for directing me to BUMPzee, I will make sure to check it out. I look forward to reading more of your stuff.
i think you have a big brain, derek wong. you seem to think a lot. and then write about it. a lot.
i like.
Welcome to the community on Bumpzee
Whenever I leave a comment I always try to leave a deep link to related content and also try to give some advice because many people have their blogs setup in such a way that impelemting Dofollow could drain all the google juice out of their site.
Your tagging plugin handles a lot of internal linking, but it might be good to also add some related posts. If you are using UTW, then UTW has the function built in, and there is also a plugin to add related posts to your feeds.
@Jennifer Shih
Haha I think that the brain size has nothing to do with a lot of what I’m doing. For that matter I dispute that statement. Luckily for you, though, I will still be your friend because you like to read my blog.
@Andy Beard
Thank you very much for the personal welcome! And I appreciate the advice that you gave. I hadn’t seen the related posts function that UTW had built-in, but it was a snap to add to the sidebar. I will look into adding related posts to my feed. Thanks for the tips!
wow, you’re getting popular
I just got round to doing it myself. It’s very liberating yet scary. Kinda making that mad naked dash from the bathroom to the bedroom when your In laws are downstairs having tes and Digestives.
Well, maybe not exactly.
@tiff
I’m not sure what you mean. I still have a fairly small readership I think. The comments are only coming because I’ve been leaving comments other places and people would come and check out my site once.
@Cornwall
Your analogy is humorous to say the least.
[...] of removing the nofollow on each and every commentator’s link, he instead creates a refreshed list of the top 10 [...]
nofolow will decrease crawling pages from search engines
Good information
Thanks