Why Do I Dofollow

A short history of nofollow and dofollow:

1. Google comes up with the brilliant idea of using links to sites as indicators of site popularity/authority/importance. If you have more links pointing to your page, it’s more likely to score high in Google search results, providing you with more traffic.
2. Webmasters start the links race – trying to get as many links pointing to their website as possible.
3. Spammers abuse the concept by automatically adding links to their site from any place they can. Social media sites, including blogs and social bookmarking sites, become prime target because they allow visitors to “leave their mark” on a site.
4. Blogs are inundated by fake comments that are nothing but automated spam.
5. In an effort to stop the spam attack, Google announces the “nofollow” tag. Once attached to a link, this tag “cancels out” the link’s search engine optimization (SEO) effect.
6. WordPress and other blogging platforms add the “nofollow” tag by default to all comments.

Now, here’s the problem:

Spammers have not stopped their spam comments. Using automated scripts, it costs them nothing to try and even with no SEO benefits, if their link is up, someone may just click it.

Blog comments however, have been cut out from Google’s picture of web activity.

I see no reason why on-topic useful and meaningful comments should not reflect on the commenter’s website. If he’s an active commenter in the market, doesn’t that lend more authority to his website?I think the “nofollow” on legitimate comments is helping no one.

My finger isn’t pointed at Google. The Google people just provide us with tools and then do their own thing of trying to get the best search results for their users. Fair enough. I think it’s up to bloggers to get rid of the automatic “nofollow” tags on their blogs. Moreover, I think the people behind WordPress should at the very least provide an easy option in the WordPress settings to switch the nofollow tag on or off.

Just to clarify: I do NOT want to see spam comments on any blog. Blog owners should and do fight back using spam filters such as Askimet for WordPress. In my experience, Askimet is very effective in keeping out 99% of automated spam. As for comments that do go through – this is where the blog owner needs to stay involved, reading the comments and getting rid of any spam.

So, I’ll be doing my small share by disabling the nofollow tags on this blog and other blogs I run. If the blog is active and I want comments, I’ll be taking the time to review comments and weed out any spam that Askimet didn’t catch.

With a clear conscience of doing my share, I’ll move on to doing what many of us webmasters are already doing: seeking out dofollow blogs (i.e. blogs that disable the nofollow feature) to interact and add insightful, meaningful and useful comments there, along with a legitimate link back to my own blog. More on how to find these blogs in another post.

ETA:

Following some advice I got from Ed on PeculiarBlog.com who went back to nofollow, I’ve come up with some commenting rules for this blog. I am looking forward to comments and discussions, but anything that does not follow my own quality criteria gets canned.

Tagged as: askimet, dofollow, nofollow, SEO, spam