Don’t Look Now, but You’re Being Followed

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Yesterday, Philip Liu paid John Chow to do a review of his blog through ReviewMe. (How’s that for some link love? Quadruple word score! )

From John’s review, I found Philip’s post about disabling nofollow. I think he’s absolutely right, and so as of this morning nofollow is disabled here as well.

Now if you have no idea what nofollow is, you obviously have no clue what I’m talking about, so here’s a brief summary. The nofollow tag was created a couple of years ago in an attempt to stop comment spam. What it did was add an attribute to all links in comments that told search engines not to follow the links — thus eliminating the main reason for comment spamming.

Well, if you’ve been running a blog for any amount of time, you know how much good it did. Not to say that it wasn’t a great idea, but sometimes great ideas don’t end up being great in practice. You never know until you try, though. (I hope you’ve had plenty of failures in your life.)

So anyway, this morning I installed the DoFollow plugin, which means that any links in any comments you make (including your name) are now followed by search engines. Considering this blog already has almost 1,000 links to it and an Alexa ranking in the 300K range after just a month, there’s a lot of value in those links already — and just think what they’ll be worth in another month, another six months, another year.

I’m doing this because your comments add a tremendous amount of value. It’s far more interesting to read a blog that’s a dialogue (particularly a blog like this one where so much of the information is subjective), and we can all learn from each other. If you’re providing value, why shouldn’t you also get at least a link.

Now, I couldn’t do this without the world’s greatest anti-blog-spam tool, Spam Karma. It’s a Godsend. It allows me to open up comments completely and blog away, without ever having to worry about spam slipping in. I can not recommend it highly enough.

So comment away, and think about whether you ought to turn off nofollow on your own blog!

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