Your WordPress Blog - To Follow Or Not to Follow - The WordPress Question of the Day
by Cathy Perkins
<ed- We found this article to be extremely useful to Wordpress users. Many people, like us, use wordpress as their blogging platform. Yes, ContentMagician is run on wordpress and so far so good….>
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To Follow, or Not to Follow? That’s the question. What does that even mean? What am I even talking about, follow and no follow? That’s something that Google dreamed up in their wisdom, in 2005 as a matter of fact. It seems like ages ago, but it’s not that long ago. Google thought that people were getting too much comment spam on their blogs, which was probably true.
If you’ve looked at your Akismet queue, or if you’ve looked at your comments queue when Akismet was down a few weeks ago, you saw a lot of comment spam. It’s here, and it’s here to stay and it will probably only get worse as it has over the past few years. People are getting smarter about this comment spam, they now will do it individually and will say things like, “Oh, nice post, come and look at my site,” and of course their site is embedded behind their name. So there’s some comment spam. It adds no value to your site, but it gives them a link back.
What does nofollow mean? It means that while the search engines will still follow links in your websites (with a few exceptions); they give no weight to those links. Now let’s think about what that means. If someone is kind enough to come and comment on your blog, and they put their URL in the comment section as they’re urged to do, its right there, then Google will count that as zero.
Let me explain Google’s point of view. I’ve already talked about what comment spam is, and Google says that they don’t like it either, and this is from them in 2005, and I’m quoting them now. “We’ve been testing a new tag that blocks comments. From now on when Google sees the attribute, ‘relationship=nofollow,’ on links those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, track-backs, and referral lists.”
Excuse me? We’re punishing the good comment people because of the spammers? Is that even fair? I don’t think so.
We don’t know what kind of criteria that Google even uses to determine that because they’re not telling us. They tell us actually very little. I have unfortunately heard of people loosing page rank and finally figuring out that it was because of their blog roll or their list of links that they very carefully (I’m very careful about who I put in my links list; I don’t just put anybody in there) put together. I think that most bloggers are the same way, but it’s the people who buy the page ranks, put them in their blog roll and Google doesn’t like that because you’re paying for links.
Now, I’m really a follow fan, it doesn’t sound like it, but I really am, because I think that people who comment on your blogs should be rewarded with links that count back to their sites. I think that if you make the effort to go out and comment on other people’s blogs (as I have urged you to do) that you should be rewarded with Google giving your link some credence and some weight.
There are ways to get around that. there are some plug-ins. Two in particular are HeadSpace and Do Follow. Both let you have Google follow your comments. Here are two other reasons why nofollow on comments is a bad idea. If you’re a blogger, I mean a real blogger, who really cares about your blog, you moderate your comments, you’re over there seeing what’s going on, and even if you only moderate the first comment and let the rest of them come in, and you have the ability to get an email whenever anyone comments.
The Bottom Line: Isn’t it your job as a blog owner to take care of that stuff on your own, without help from Google?
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