yesfollow
June 2nd, 2006
I have decided to remove the rel=”nofollow” tags from the comments section of my blog. Having them in place does nothing to discourage spammers, and they only seem to punish the people who actually do participate in the conversation. If I have a user that reads my blog on a daily basis, and the user takes the time to participate in the conversation, why shouldn’t s/he be awarded with a link? I know that people have other things they could be doing with their time. I am fully aware that participating in the commenting on this blog is not a high priority on anybody’s list. So, if somebody spares a few moments to contribute, I view it as a professional courtesy to give them some love in return.
Wordpress blogs insert the rel=”nofollow” tag into all comments by default. Luckily, there are a handful of plugins available, and in a matter of minutes, I was able to get rid of the nofollow tags. The plugin I chose, the Dofollow plugin, simply replaces the “nofollow” tag with a tag reading “external” - which I assume is garbage, and ignored by the engines.
For more information on nofollow, and whether it is for you, see:
WP Codex - Nofollow
Wikimedia - Nofollow
The yesfollow Project
Nofollow No Good?
Support for Nofollow Crumbling?
June 2nd, 2006 at 9:19 pm
I’ll follow your lead on this one. I agree with you 100%, those who take the time to post constructive comments should get link love.
It appears most people are eager to show the world how popular their blogs are by displaying everyone’s comments. I’ve taken the opposite approach by not approving everyone’s comments on my blog.
This could be construed as some sort of censorship but the simple fact is it takes quite a bit of time to come up with good creative content and it means more to me when I see my readers put a little bit of thought into what they have to say on my blog.
June 3rd, 2006 at 9:57 am
[…] Jim was ahead of his time killing nofollow, Nick gives nofollow a smackdown, and Greg steps up to the plate and knocks one out with his yesfollow post. Having them in place does nothing to discourage spammers, and they only seem to punish the people who actually do participate in the conversation. If I have a user that reads my blog on a daily basis, and the user takes the time to participate in the conversation, why shouldn’t s/he be awarded with a link? […]
June 3rd, 2006 at 8:18 pm
[…] http://greghartnett.com/yesfollow/ Thema: Kram Keine Kommentare -
[…]
June 3rd, 2006 at 8:20 pm
[…] http://greghartnett.com/yesfollow/ […]
June 4th, 2006 at 11:40 am
Will the removal of no-follow be retroactive to previous post?
June 4th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
from looking at the underlying code, it would appear that comments form previous posts no longer contain the nofollow tag.
June 4th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
I’ve been getting hit by a huge amount of comment spam and referrer spam. I’m not sure that anybody really cares about nofollow - certainly not the blog spammers.
The sad thing is that some people on more mainstream sites seem to be trying to use nofollow in order to hoard “Google Juice”. Makes nofollow come across as something of a backfire.
June 4th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
[…] I have removed the nofollow from my comments, as I think most of the intentions of the tag were misdirected, but there are worthwhile applications from a development standpoint for the tag. I agree with Greg who leads us to dofollow and Jim on some of nofollow, but I think there are points to which everyone has overlooked. […]
June 6th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
Actually, the plugin merely removes the rel=nofollow attribute, while leaving the other rel= attributes. I’m assuming you’re using an external link plugin, that adds rel=external.
June 14th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
[…] Beitrag mit dem schönen Titel yesfollow gequotet: I have decided to remove the rel=”nofollow” tags from the comments section of my blog. Having them in place does nothing to discourage spammers, and they only seem to punish the people who actually do participate in the conversation. […]
June 15th, 2006 at 9:34 am
I think the nofollow tag hurts the little guy. If your just starting out as a webmaster and you submit your site to Google, you don’t get any rank without links. How do you get links? People say create quality content and others will link to you naturally. That may be true, but how does anyone know your there, if they can’t find you in the search engines? The most natural way to build links is to participate in the internet community, like posting on blogs and forums. People say, “if your just commenting to get a link, then we aren’t interested.” So everybody who wants a link is either a spammer or a has nothing worthwhile to say. The only reason I found this blog was that I was looking for places to get links to my website. Does this make my comment worthless?
August 13th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
If you have comment moderation on your blog, then there is no need of nofollow tag. I believe that a user who actually increases content on your website should be rewarded, and that’s the perfect way to give link back. I have also removed nofollow tag from my blog, and I have actually seen increase in comments.
October 7th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
I totally agree with Brian’s comment, I am new to this and I am having trouble with gaining rank. The concept of yesfollow is great for me and anyone else who is starting out fresh.
Brendan
October 15th, 2006 at 3:48 am
I agree, wordpress has been harsh putting nofollow tags on comments by default. Users who get the comments you want shouldn’t have to be punnished, they should get there measly link.
November 13th, 2006 at 2:02 am
The NoFollow tag was an idea of Google to counter the spammers. However the spammers don’t care whether the blog has nofollow tags or not. They are just concerned with getting some incoming links. But this punishes the genuine commentators who actively participate on blogs to make the discussions interesting. So I feel the best way to tackle spammers is by using good captchas rather than using NoFollow tags. I will start my new blog with YesFollow. Thanks for making me aware of the YesFollow plugins.
April 12th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
I’m relatively new to blogging (yes it really is 2007 now lol) but I agree it seems Google have taken a step to far thinking up this measure.
I was researching the nofollow tag - which is how I found this blog post - and further more, its how I’ve found out about this plugin for wordpress.
Allowing links means you can foster a community between you and your readers - in the process all going up in PR, and thats the way it should be.
Martin
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:21 am
Blog spam control can be done through many other methods. Keeping nofollow is just lame (note to self: use Cristian’s plugin to do that when not too lazy
).
For blogs the rules are simple:
- if spam delete
- if valid comment, is rude not giving that visitor smthg back
September 6th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
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