Why I NoFollow The DoFollow Movement
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007Categories: General Web
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Very clever title, I know. The following article will likely be one of my more controversial blog posts. I’m not against negative responses (or positive responses :)) as long as you refrain from personal attacks. So far, I’ve downloaded the DoFollow plugin, and uploaded it to my server. I have not activated it through WordPress’s Admin Panel and I will tell you why.
What Is The DoFollow Movement?
The DoFollow Movement is a movement where its blogging participants choose to eliminate the rel=”nofollow” from their commenters’ websites.
Removing the rel=”nofollow” from your outbound links (<a></a>) allows the link to be counted as a “vote” in Google’s PageRank system. As a result, it’s possible that your commenter’s website will get additional PageRank which may result in higher Search Engine Result Placement (SERP).
To my knowledge, most blogging platforms (Blogspot, WordPress, etc.) include this attribute by default.
One of its goals was to discourage spambots that would automatically post comments to hundreds (thousands?) of blogs a day. Originally, all of these comments would count as votes, and would benefit the spammer.
If you’re interested in joining a no-no-follow movement or group, there is one started over at href=”http://www.bumpzee.com/no-nofollow/” title=”dofollow bumpzee group” rel=”nofollow”>BumpZee.
Arguments in Favor of DoFollow
- Many plugins (including Akismet, bundled by default in WordPress) prevent comment spam. Theoriginal “goal” of adding the rel=”nofollow” has been achieved, it’s now safe toreturn to following links
- A backlink is a reward for someone who takes the time to post a comment
- Indirectly builds blog traffic, you’re building your community
- Aids in networking with fellow bloggers
Why I NoFollow The DoFollow Movement
I appreciate sincere comments
An example to illustrate my point, if I were to invite people over to my house, would I be happier to receive visitors that want to eat free food, or visitors that genuinely want to be in my house? Offering free food, yes, it’s a great incentive and would likely get you more visitors, but the line can start to get blurred between those that are genuine, and those that aren’t.
Retaining rel=”nofollow” means that I KNOW that people that are posting comments on my blog, really want to post comments and don’t have an ulterior motive. If you refuse to comment because your link isn’t being followed by a Search Engine, that’s okay. That doesn’t mean I won’t have a look at your website myself.
I don’t want to engage in further moderation
Right now, my blog’s comment section is mostly unmoderated. (If you’re interested, I only manually moderate comments that contain any type of link IN the post). If I remove the nofollow and people start to notice, I may get visitors who have nothing more to say then “Thank you” or “nice article”, and they posted these because of the ulterior motives mentioned in the point above.
As it stands, if I were to receive comments like these that weren’t caught by Akismet, I think the person would be genuinely trying to thank me. I appreciate that and I’d leave that on my blog. I just don’t want to be the one who goes through and moderates which posts deserve a backlink, and which ones don’t.
I want to avoid potential complications with Google
Google has already mentioned reciprocal linking as being something to be careful of. If information heavy websites that have dozens of outgoing links per page start being looked down by Google, I’m not someone who can afford to be on the receiving end of the wrath. Most of my traffic is thanks to Google, the last thing I want is to be in their bad books.
Conclusion
Those are my reasons for not following the dofollowers. As someone who is very flexible and understanding, I’d love to hear comments on the matter.
Tell me what’s on your mind.
Bedroom Furniture
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September 19th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
You should look into link maps of the web. People on forums talk about reciprocal linking being bad and if you only have 20 backlinks and they are all reciprocal, then yeah, they are bad. But, if you get into algorithmic theory and use some of the crazy mapping applications that CS majors have created, you will quickly realize what “bad” reciprocal linking looks like. It is silly to assume that your site will get banned from Google (et al) or have your links discounted simply because two sites link to each other. I guess what I am saying is, that the more people link to things on the web, with descriptive anchor text, the better the information we all get out of it will be.
With that said, I am still not sure I want to install that plugin on my blog as I get way too many spam comments every day.
September 20th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Hi Jason,
Reciprocal linking was an example of something founded on the context that it was useful to those that participated in it, similar to dofollow’ing. And abuse is being penalized.
Also, I should also note that descriptive anchor text is a strange argument, simply because, if people are filling out a name field with “Buy Used Car Parts Here” and then linking with their own site, I can’t help but feel as though my generosity is being abused.
Keyword linking is absolutely wonderful, I agree and it should be done more.
September 21st, 2007 at 4:41 pm
You actually bring up a good point. I’ve been a strong supporter of DoFollow, but just after reading your argument here, “An example to illustrate my point, if I were to invite people over to my house, would I be happier to receive visitors that want to eat free food, or visitors that genuinely want to be in my house? Offering free food, yes, it’s a great incentive and would likely get you more visitors, but the line can start to get blurred between those that are genuine, and those that aren’t,” which is very true.
I feel that’s a great point.
Just after reading that, I went and disabled the DoFollow plugin.
September 22nd, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Thanks for the comment.
See now, as an example, I know that your comments are genuine and I appreciate your visit.
September 23rd, 2007 at 6:49 am
Your arguments are quite valid though I don’t personally subscribe to them, pardon my saying. Particularly that your reasons for keeping “nofollow” is rather google-centric than pro-viewer. And you’d have to admit and recognize that most people viewing and commenting on blogs are most likely bloggers themselves, ulterior motives or otherwise.
I do not support the “movement” but I have removed the attribute for the simple reason that I believe links are made for linking. If I linkback to a site or allow a comment however trivial then I would expect searchbots to acknowledge that as well.
As for spam comments, I always advocate personal moderation. I don’t want to leave it up to a script or an attribute to check for me what should be my call in the first place. They are my traffic, and I want to be hands-on deciding what to do about them.
Maybe my opinion on the matter will change if my traffic will change to the thousands and everybody’s commenting like there was no tomorrow. AS IF!
Otherwise, my decision to leave out “nofollow” stays.
September 23rd, 2007 at 6:52 am
BTW, great layout!
September 26th, 2007 at 11:13 am
Thanks for the comment EA.
I can see how what I’m saying is google-centric, this is very true.
I understand links are supposed to link, but links having nothing but your name?
September 27th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Its ironic that many bloggers talk about this but then they actually use no follow.
October 4th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I’m using Wordpress and have thus far been too lazy to turn the nofollows off. With that said, I completely agree, the nofollow trend is a dead end. The sooner it goes the better.
October 17th, 2007 at 1:17 am
Patrick, I don’t understand when you say “links have nothing but your name?”
Links make up the entire Web. Without links nothing will work online. Maybe that’s an overstatement but I think you get the idea. Well, I was able to find your discussion here because of links.
At any rate I think the bone of contention here is the function of rel=nofollow in relation to Pagerank and search engines, because apparently inbound links to your site builds up your Pagerank significantly and thus your visibility in searches.
But I think Pagerank’s reliance on inbound links might be lessened in the years to come as social networking sites rise making it easier to connect to ones target audience more than search engines can.
Just my opinion anyway. A good day to all.
October 17th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Links make up the entire Web and link text gives credibility, but how useful is a link whose link text consists only of a username, eg. “EA” or “Patrick Burt”. Should these be links Search Engines look for?
October 26th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
I don’t know Pat, but I think search engines don’t mind the link texts as they are arbitrary and optional. Searchbots mostly take into account the content of the href attribute which is the URL and that’s it. For example, I can use “Google” as a text link but the href directs instead to “Pat-burt.com”.
Am I reading you wrong?
November 26th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Interesting read. Some valid points, but I’m not convinced.
As another comment above said, thinking “Google may not like it” puts the search engine before the community. I like search engine traffic, but I like my regular visitors more.
I don’t see any other problems with dofollow. The amount of extra moderation is very small. Akismet takes care of 99% of the spam comments left on my blog, and most of those would be posted regardless of whether I used nofollow or not. A site with more traffic might get more dofollow spam, but then again, they’d get more spam anyway.
I believe the use of nofollow is unnatural, and I like to vote for my readers site.
December 15th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
I’ve just downloaded a dofollow plugin, but had second thoughts installing it. I searched for nofollow or dofollow, instead, i found this site. Like you, i’ve been thinking, too, that having this dofollow is just for the benefit of others. Most of my commenters have this nofollow on their blogs, anyway, why should I have this dofollow on mine. Thanks for this post!
December 18th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Thanks My. I see we see it the same way. This just may be the subject of my new Devil’s Advocate series.
June 4th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Patrick I think your reasons for not joining the movement are excellent. I hope you don’t mind my linking to this post?
June 4th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
[…] Before you join the movement drop by Patrick Burt’s blog and see why he has chosen not to join the Dofollow movement. Patrick makes some valuable points. “Why I NoFollow The DoFollow Movement.” […]
June 4th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
No problem at all Rose. Thank you.