Why I Support Dofollow – Clarification

Uh oh… not another post about the dofollow issue?

Blame Extreme John who just posted about removing nofollow blogs from his RSS reader. Since even the mighty Google thinks I’m an authority on the subject (this blog is ranked in the top ten results for “dofollow blogs”), I figured I need to give my input… again.

In his post, Extreme John refers to mutual linkjuice gifts and a “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” concept. I’d like to present a slightly different angle on this. I don’t dofollow with other bloggers in mind – I dofollow with surfers in mind. Here’s why.

The Heated Dofollow Debate

If you look at Extreme John’s post and the following comments, you could easily get the impression that most webmasters passionately support dofollow. In my experience, this is not the case.

Take Sitepoint Forums. If you want to start thread with lots of replies, use the word “dofollow” in the title. Supporting dofollow on blog comments over there is a surefire way to get flamed (no pun intended). If the people are in a good mood, they’ll just tell you you’re wasting your time. They could also mark you for a spammer.

To be honest, they have a point. Dofollow blogs can become spam magnets. Just visit the darker side over at the DP forums and run a search for dofollow blogs. Spammers all over the place, selling lists of dofollow blogs along with spam bots that will do the dirty work for you.

Thus, my first instinct was to go nofollow, because that’s what the “good guys” recommended. But then I gave the matter some thought and you can read more about my conclusions in this post. Bottom line – nofollow blogs get as much spam as dofollow blogs and it’s up to the blogger to click the “spam” link and trash the spam comments.

One more point for nofollow supporters to consider

Google (and other Search Engines) keep telling us that serving different versions of your page to surfers and search engines is a big No No. That’s why cloaking is a good way to get your site banned from the SERP’s.

I argue that the nofollow tag is in fact a form of cloaking. It’s showing your surfer one thing – a link to another site – while telling the search engine to ignore that very link.

If you think the link is bad, don’t have it on your blog. That’s part of your blogger duties and that’s why you should always monitor your comments and have spam filters in place.

If you think the link is valid, legitimate and useful to your visitors, there is no reason in the world to hide it from the search engines.

Nofollow has in facr become a tool for linkjuice channeling, aka link sculpting. By definition, it creates one picture of the web for users and another for search engines.

Now, if Google, or anyone else, wishes to devalue comment links in their algorithm, or to disregard them completely, that is entirely up to them. As a web publisher, I just want to have a clean page with no behind-the-scenes changes in the code that my surfers can’t see.

Tagged as: comments, dofollow, google, SEO