To Follow Or NoFollow?
Virtually all blogs that were set up since early 2005 automatically apply the "nofollow" attribute to comments and pingbacks. This attribute basically instructs search engines to ignore the links provided by blog commentators when calculating the link destination's pagerank.
Nofollow was introduced and promoted by Google to combat the phenomenon of comment spam which was plaguing millions of blogs around the world. Spammers were bombarding blogs with fake comments in the hope of getting credit for the backlinks to their websites (or so Google believed), thereby improving their own search engine rankings.
Two years later, it has become obvious that nofollow didn't stop comment spam. Instead, it turned out that spammers are spamming blogs to get direct traffic and not necessarily to improve their search engine rankings.
Apart from not having achieving its declared goal, nofollow has had some unintended consequences. Wikipedia now applies nofollow to all outgoing links, thereby retaining the "link energy" it receives from the millions of sites that link to it. The result? Wikipedia becomes even more popular and dominant in search engine results while continually pushing down other sites. It is not inconceivable that someday soon a Wikipedia entry about a person or company could rank higher in search engine results than the entity's website itself.
Meanwhile, anti-spam software for blogs has become so advanced that it actually catches 95% of all spam attempts. The Daily Domainer uses Spam Karma 2 for Wordpress and we're extremely satisfied with it.
To reflect this technological advance and to reward all our commentators who make valuable contributions to discussions on our blog, we have deactivated the nofollow attribute.
This means that if you submit a comment to any of the posts on this blog and include a link to your website, it will count as a valuable backlink and improve your search engine rankings. The same applies if you talk about one of the Daily Domainer's articles on your blog and send us a pingback (your blogging software will usually do this automatically).
Hi Rene, thanks for implementing this change. I recently did the same thing on my blog, but using Kimmo Suominem's DoFollow plugin, which allows you to disable nofollow after a comment has been on your site for a specified length of time.
This way, if any comment spam gets through temporarily, it'll probably be removed before the spammer can get any google juice. Which plugin did you use?
Isn't it just special how Google bas basically outsourced the job of identifying link spam to blog owners rather than coming up with a better algorithm?
It is such a shame that Wikipedia has started to use nofollow as trends are leaning towards disabling nofollow on blogs now!
Like Jonathon, I recently added the dofollow plugin to my site, choosing Kimmo Suominem's incarnation of it. Being given time to check that no spma does slip through the net was the decision maker for me. We don't want to gift any spammer a free link, even for a day or two, but holding back the benefit from real commenters that add value to the conversation is too much. I think Kimmo struck the perfect compromise.
If Wikipedia does that, everyone linking to Wikipedia should do the same.
I'm not sure that's a fair complaint. Google was trying to help blog owners get less spam, assuming that if there was less incentivre to spam, it would decrease.
re: which plugin, you don't really need a plugin. You can edit the theme and remove the no follow part.
I want to be more popular and dominant in search engine results too! Sounds like NOFOLLOW is just the ticket!
yeah… those stupid wiki’s!
wonder what happen if we all use nofollow to them?
Have a good one.
Just Follow!. nofollow is a waste
nofollow = fail. Also, the nofollow does carry some link juice, but just not as much… so I hear.
@design nottingham- Nofollow hasn't failed, in fact it is quite the opposite in my opinion. Google, Yahoo, and most major search engines use it, as well as some of the biggest platforms on the web including Wordpress and many forum software(of course you can always bypass it, but by default the comment links are nofollow.)
"If Wikipedia does that, everyone linking to Wikipedia should do the same." even if this was to happen they would still own google ranking as i think there is an affiliation between the two companies!
If wiki is doing that, everyone who links to wiki should also do that.
Feb 22nd, 2007 at 8:43 am
[...] Daily Domainer discusses the apparent failure of the nofollow tag and wikipedia's decision to apply it to all [...]
Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:00 am
[...] is why you need to do it from a small/new business perspective. If you keep the nofollow tags and aloofly say “I don’t want to deal with comment spam,” this screams you are just lazy [...]