Comments on: Why I NoFollow The DoFollow Movement

By: Patrick Burt

Patrick Burt — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:49:02 +0000

No problem at all Rose. Thank you.

By: » NoFollow vs DoFollow by Rose DesRochers - World Outside my Window

» NoFollow vs DoFollow by Rose DesRochers - World Outside my Window — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:27:15 +0000

[…] 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.” […]

By: Rose

Rose — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:48:27 +0000

Patrick I think your reasons for not joining the movement are excellent. I hope you don’t mind my linking to this post?

By: Patrick Burt

Patrick Burt — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:12:22 +0000

Thanks My. I see we see it the same way. This just may be the subject of my new Devil’s Advocate series.

By: My

My — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 21:46:14 +0000

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!

By: Sutocu

Sutocu — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:31:11 +0000

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.

By: EA

EA — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 02:35:40 +0000

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?

By: Patrick Burt

Patrick Burt — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:07:07 +0000

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?

By: EA

EA — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 05:17:24 +0000

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.

By: Nicholas

Nicholas — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 02:18:44 +0000

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.