WordPress – NoFollow – Should I Follow?
July 27th, 2007 by Stephen Cronin (8,452 views)About a month ago, I learnt what the nofollow tag on links in my blog meant. Very quickly, I became aware of the No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community and the existence of plugins to remove the nofollow tag. The question is: should I follow suite and get a plugin?
I have been mulling this over for several weeks now. At first I was quite enthusiatic, but I’ve started having a few doubts about the concept.
Is NoFollow A Bad Thing?
One of the main reasons I’ve been holding back is that I’m not convinced that the nofollow tag is a bad thing. In fact, I think in an ideal world, it would be a very good thing, as it limits people’s ability to boost their own PageRank. Instead, they have to rely on other people liking their content.
Will Disabling No Follow Increase Spam?
Another reason is that there seem to be a few people who are removing their plugins and reverting to the default nofollow behaviour. Reasons given are largely to do with being targeted for spam.
I am less worried by this. Spam is a fact of life. Also, if I join the community, not only am I opening myself to spam, I am opening myself to other traffic. If someone leaves a comment on my site that’s relative to the post, that’s good – even if their motive is to get a link to their site.
Decision Time
So, I’m not sure I agree that nofollow is bad thing, but disabling it may increase my traffic. Should I stick to my principles or should I sell out? 
There’s something else: I have been checking out some of the blogs from the No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community and leaving comments. Although there is no requirement for me to do so, I feel that if I’m going to benefit from other people disabling nofollow, then I should follow suite.
So, mostly for that reason, I’m going to look at plugins. I’ll start at Andy Beard’s excellent list of dofollow plugins, choose one and give it a try.
Do you use a plugin to disable nofollow? If so, which one?
Tags: Dofollow, spam, traffic, Wordpress Plugins
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I’m one of the quitters that gave up on the dofollow thing after 6 months.
Spam is indeed a fact of life and I already have it well under control. However, the “SEO spam” that you get drove me nuts.
Folks will drop by your blog after they find you on one of the “Do Follow” blog lists. THey’ll pick an article and write a reply. Most times, the reply is along the lines of “neat article” or “hey, I hadn’t thought of that before”. Something reasonably harmless. But, now they got a free link.
Sure, it’s trivial to just remove the link from their comment. But after 5 months, it just became too much of a pain. :-p
Now, most folks are a lot more low-key than I am… and for them, this is a great movement!
This is a pretty old post, but what I did on my blog was that I added a Top Commentators widget, that is only after you comment enough you’ll get a dofollow link back and spammers use different email addresses every time which would always keep them off the list! Moreover, the Akismet Spam plugin would get them if they messed with the linking!
Yeah I did that top commenter as well and then I found that everyone just made worthless 3 to 6 word comments to gain more comments – which is just about as bad as having all the spammers.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your comments. You make a good point – it will be annoying if I get a lot of “nice post” comments. I’m still going to give it a try though (you can tell me you told me so later!).
One site I visited (I can’t remember who’s) had a very clear comment policy statement, saying that he reserved the right to delete trivial comments such as these. If it get’s too much for me, I may consider doing something similar (although I’d prefer not to and it would still be extra work). We’ll see what happens.
Nice site by the way.
Good point Stephen – my policy is changed a bit now, but I’ve made sure there was a link to it right by that “Submit Comment” button.
@Stephen:
Chris made a good point. I got a lot of spam even since I removed nofollow. I also get a lot of “Great article … online casino .. ” spam comments.
I have never thought about the comment policy. I should have one. Thanks!
I am heading to China next month.
PS. What do you think about the subscribe to comment feature?
Chris, I will have to sort out a comment policy soon.
Terence, I always tick the email followup if it’s there, as I like to see what other people are saying. Sometimes, I’ll leave another comment – it can turn into a real discussion at times. Which part of China are you going to?
Stephen:
I will go to Guilin again and then the southern China. So you don’t have the “subscribe to comment” feature on your blog?
Terence,
I do have the subscribe to comment plugin now! I had it installed on my local site, but not on my live site. All fixed now. Thanks for pointing this out.
Have a great time in China – I’m up north in Hebei.
I’ve been using it for a few months, but I’ve been thinking of disabling it. I used to receive a lot of spam before, but now it’s ridiculous. I do use the disclaimer Word Press plug in, and I do delete comments that slip past the spam radar (Spam Karma & Akismet.)
Here is a new perspective on it for you that I haven’t heard people talk about yet, and the initial thoughts for a post in the next few days, maybe even later today…
My commenters are my guest bloggers
Regular readers of my blog know that on any topic I write about that gets a few comments, there will be just as much value to be found in the comments as in the original post.
Manual spam happens, but you could can easily spot the people going down lists or using search, because they post comments to discussions about Dofollow.
Join in a few on sites that have subscribe to comments installed, adn you will soon know know are “making the rounds”
A comments policy is a good idea and is something I have advocated for 8 months, but very few people do it, and even fewer read it.
I have even tried forcing people to read the comments policy, but something went wrong with the cookies in some browsers, so I had to scrap the idea.
Being such a prominent supporter of dofollow, you would expect I would get more abuse, but honestly I don’t.
It does take a little time to manage comments, but honestly it takes more to manage the trackbacks than anything else. It doesn’t take long to flag each new offender in Spam Karma, and they then become a none issue.
Some of the people who started out as “dofollow spammers” have actually become quite valuable active members of my community, giving me blogroll links and links from posts.
I have 2 additional dofollow blogs in the community that receive on average one comment per month… between them, because they are not being updated.
For a spammer they are worthwhile commenting on, PR4 and PR5, thus are a good control point.
Spam increases based upon an increase in posting and gaining links. I get nowhere near as much spam as Weblogs tools collection (also dofollow)
Andy,
Thanks for the great comment.
I agree with what you’re saying. There’s a lot of value in the comments section (you just proved the point). I have no problem with people coming to get the link love, if they’re leaving relative comments.
I will get a clear comment policy sorted out and once I do, I’ll delete borderline comments (like ‘great post’) which add no value, if I feel they are detracting from the post as a whole.
As for spammers turning into community members – that was the number one reason I disabled nofollow – because I’d started leaving comments on the Bumpzee no nofollow community’s websites and felt I should reciprocate.
Strange you’re not getting more spam. I’ll have to head over and leave some!
You’ve got a great site there by the way and it was the guiding light when I was toying with the idea of disabling nofollow.
“To follow or not to follow this is the question”:)
I do believe you will get more spam, but just thinking about it, I found a way to prevent spammers submitting to “follow” blogs..
A site with a database with all the IPs and e-mails spammers use and a wordpress plugin that scans the DB and reports any new spammer.
Hi Laci,
I’ve been getting some spam, but then so have other people who aren’t dofollow. I’m not convinced that dofollow blogs get much in the way of extra spam.
Are you talking about Askimet there?
I find I’m well covered by using the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin to stop the bots, the Simple Trackback Validation plugin to stop trackback spam, and Akismet to clean up the rest.
If you don’t like Captcha style protection, try the TanTanNoodlesSimple Spam Filter plugin instead of Math Comment Spam Protection.
This combination should result in virtually no spam getting through.
I have recieved indifferent results. Some of my blogs are now do-follow. And sadly i have experienced increases in spam. But then again, genuine comments have increased aswell. So im taking the good with the bad. Im gonna trial it for a few months, i advise you do the same.
Andy
Andrew, I agree: I think it increases traffic, good and bad. For me it’s worthwhile. I only get about 1 spam comment per day. I have gone through some bad patches where it increased to 100 or so a day, but it all turned out to be trackback spam. The Simple Trackback Validation plugin solved the problem for me.
At first I set it to mark what it found as spam and deliver them to Askimet, which meant I still had to go through them. After 3 weeks, there were no false positives, so now they just get deleted and don’t trouble me at all.
Hello, Andy, Andrew, and Stephen and others that are watching this thread of comments…
I am very interested in this concept of nofollow, dofollow, and commentluv I find so many different opinions that I am sure that the only way to really see if it is right for me is to test it out.
I have a few questions…if anyone has the time….What is a trackback…? What is the best way to find dofollow blogs with commentluv…I am assuming all blogs with commentluv may not be a dofollow…some may be a nofollow…
One final question…please look at the way I put my name in the name box and tell me if this is ok…or frowned upon..
I teach linking building strategies…most of strategies I am familiar with are article marketing…I do not want to pass on bad information…
Hi Deb,
The CommentLuv plugin itself has no effect on whether a blog is DoFollow or not.
The vast majority of WordPress blogs are nofollow as this is the default – they need to use a dofollow plugin to disable nofollow. So, the majority of blogs running CommentLuv are in fact no follow. You have to find those which also have a dofollow plugin.
To find such sites, you could try a Google search on: "Enable CommentLuv which will try and get your last blog post, please be patient" dofollow (including the quote marks). This should only find sites with the CommentLuv plugin active and with the word DoFollow somewhere on the page. You have to check each result to make sure, but many of these are DoFollow. Of course, as I said on the CommentLuv post, maybe someone will come up with a list of DoFollow CommentLuv blogs.
As for the name field: it depends on the individual blogger. I’d have no problem with what you’ve left. I think I remember Andy Beard saying that name and keywords is fine with him – if he can find out some information about you at the site (ie it’s not just a company site), but I can’t find where he said it now. However, there are others who would mark your comment as spam – see the reader reaction on Pearls delete or edit comments post.
To be safe, if your targetting DoFollow CommentLuv blogs, I’d recommend name only in the name field – you get a deep link with the post title (presumably containing keywords) from CommentLuv, so why risk being marked as spam. Unless of course you know the blog you’re commenting on is fine with it (check the other comments, preferably older ones which haven’t been marked as spam).
Hope that helps.
Imagine when you have a 6 PR blog and then join the do follow movement.
The traffic will skyrocket.
I pray for those who disable no follow for their blog, a good enjoyable life to come
debt advisor, as I said on the other post, there’s no need to wait…
DoFollow movement is rising in Russia now.
But it’s hard to understand real value of DoFollow. It’s simple if you sell something, but i don’t know is it good or not if you making blog not for selling products, and not for making money?
Ariston,
Dofollow links from blog comments aren’t great, as you can’t always use your keywords, the post may not be on a topic related to your blog (so less authority passed) and I think Google probably devalues comment links a little, but they are still better than nothing.
They have value for blogs because it will increase PageRank and your positioning in the SERPS, meaning more visitors. If you don’t sell anything, you can still make money from advertising (such as Adsense). If you don’t have adverts, it’s still good to get traffic! Even if you don’t want to advertise, its a good feeling to see your blog at the top of search engine results!
I think you can’t really blame the removal of the nofollow tag for spam, yes you might (most probably are) listed on a couple of no-nofollow lists and if you are you are most probably benefiting in terms of traffic.
From what I’ve read throughout the blog I think you’re a quite dedicated blogger, and take spam very seriously. I’ve also see you comment back and reply to questions on old posts like these. I’m quite sure that automatic comments by robots (If they manage to get past the math spam protection add-on) will get your attention and be removed.
Drunk Text,
I’m certainly benefiting from extra traffic – some of that traffic turn into regular readers, some leave a decent comment and then go on their way, some leave spam comments. The only real problem is the fine line between decent comment and spam comment. Apart from that, there’s no problem.
Hi,
Wonderful conversation
I recently upgraded my version of WordPress, and was surprised when I found the “nofollow” added automatically – not sure how I feel about this, but I appreciate the conversation above.
I don’t get a lot of spam, Akismet is doing a good job. I’m leaning towards adding the plugin to remove nofollow, just because maybe it’s a nice “thank you” for adding a comment. However before my upgrade, I was always manually checking the url of any comments, and I wasn’t always letting them through. So I am on the fence with this one.
What’s the name of the plugin that lets you “notify me of followup comments via email”?
Jill
The whole nature of the web is links. Search engines, especially google, try to replicate human behavior. I think a whole lot of nofollow going on definitely disrupts the search engines algorithms.
So in my opinion nofollow is a bad thing. It skews the popularity from what is really being talked about. This is probably pretty big as there are some pretty heavy hitter sites out there using nofollow. Wikipedia probably being the biggest.
It’s pretty disheartening to spend a lot of time keeping wikipedia up to date and providing valuable information and not get a little link love. Link love is great andto me reminiscent of capitalism. I love capitalism.
Phil
Well, I agree with no nofollow. I am in full support of dofollow blogs. The thing about it is not many people understand about anchored text. Anchored text is not a bad thing, which is why I’m in luv with you KeywordLuve plugin
It depends on what you want for your blog. I know a lot of people thrive on comments for their blogs. If you want comments, dofollow is a big plus. The only thing is spam control. Their are plugins that allow you to dofollow some links and nofollow the rest. Whatever the case, I believe in dofollow and use them on some of my blogs.
I’m not worried about spam for no nofollow. This is nothing that Akismet and captchas cannot take care of. If your blog relies on comments for fuel, than dofollow is the way to go.
I’m looking into the dofollow plugin that’s called link luv…i think. Anyway, you have control over which links you allow dofollowed and which links remain nofollow. Dofollow is a great reward for contributors. I don’t mind giving a dofollow link to someone with an appropriate site who contributes to the content and conversation of a specific post.
I don’t see any good value in Do-Follow. At least for me, I can’t see any increase in comments if my posts are Do-Follow or No-Follow. Dofollow only increases spam.
Deciding to remove the nofollow attribute from your links is a big step. On one side, you’ll get respect from many in the blogging community for passing juice to their sites. On the other, you can fall prey to scrupulous internet marketers.
LINK REMOVED: because of failure to use KeywordLuv syntax (name@keywords)
Stephen, I would like to know what plugin do you use to create hierarchical comments? I was looking for something like this but without success.
I am defintely for the Dofollow as it help many people self promote their site.
I know many sites that have money advantage and just pay an SEO firm to put anchor text links on high page rank sites making the competition an uneven plain field.
I have been doing SEO for the past 3 years for my various sites and after getting one of them to #1 in google out of 7,000,000 results one company is breaking google rules buying links.
So the i am will says that sites that help self promoting are great and helpig to add content and relevency to that site as well.
I believe in DoFollow as it helps many upcoming sites gain some valuable inbound links. I am working on converting my blog to DoFollow for commenters who regularly comment. I should be releasing a plugin soon for WP 2.5.1+ that should make it very simple and it will also include a very good and very simple spambot protection function as well. I have no problem with manually removing nofollow from certain comment links if the person leaves a valuable content related to the article. Just my .02
With automated software now doing the finding for you, do follow blogs are increasing in favor for all those looking to gain some link love. The blog owner on one hand can expect increased comment policing while at the same time increased viewership and some amount of back links from do follow lists.
It’s a great way to stop people from leaving stupid comments like “Great Post”, add a value to a page ahe person posting have an investment in the post and would like to see it grow by adding a post with substance.
No wonder that this page has a google #4…
It seems that I am one of those low-key DoFollow bloggers
Fortunately, spam has not been much of a problem for me. The WP-Spam Free plugin seems to do well with this because most of the spam comes from bots rather than manual human commenters. I don’t even use captcha or Akismet; I like to keep things nice and simple.
Occasionally I do encounter human SEO spam, but this can be handled easily thorough judicious moderation. If someone tries to put a keyword in the name field and they’re obviously just trying to get a backlink, and especially if they are trying to link to a site that could get me in trouble with Google (link farm, bad neighborhood, etc.), I will simply remove the link but let the actual text content remain for free speech purposes.
[...] source of backlinks are comments on DoFollow blogs, but the anchor text is normally [...]
This will be a plug-in that we will be adding to our blog. Thanks for some insight into the situation.
I just installed commentluv and dofollow on my blogs, and I am waiting to see if I will be spammed.
Question… Do you think the blogs that will allow you to put your keywords on their comments will have to be relevant to the commentators website subject? For example, my site is about real estate and yours is all about web development. Would I still get any Google juice from leaving my keywords here?
Also, if a large number of commentators leave links at a post, does that juice get diluted?
People do not just spam. It is monsters that spam. Get your KeywordLuv or your CommentLuv up and do not forget an anti spam plugin like Akismet. I vote for DoFollow as the search engine loves comments and every person that “spam” your site with real related content, rewards you with the search engine checking out your site
I agree with Gert….
Using this approach (contributing useful content) will be great for everyone participating in the blog conversation.
I had typed in a nice two paragraph post, but I forgot to enter the spam protection sum. It took me to a page prompting me for a password, and after I got out of that and went back to this page my original post was lost. OUCH.
Surely there must be some spam protection tool that would be kinder to my typing efforts.
Dofollow is good and bad in both terms. It definitely increases spam but in turn you also help relevant commentors the benefit of a link. Like they say with sunshine comes dust.
I’d have to agree with some of the comments. Going dofollow doesn’t really increase spam that much unless you are put on a dofollow list that is posted for all to see. At the same time if you don’t make on of those lists than chances are you won’t see increased traffic either.
I find Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin giving me the most control ove the potential spam protection.
When talking about no follow / do follow issue, I wonder why people underestimate pre-moderation feature enabled in most blogging systems. If you have power to moderate each commenter post before it is visible on your blog, than you have option to ban spammy comments and spammers as well ?
Yes… The main reason I don’t nofollow any links it that it makes the bloggers who come and comment on my blog willing to read what I have to say in exchange for a link. In effect, I pay my readers to read what I have to say. And that works great!
I think a link is a great payment for a good content post, there for i recommend having a warning by the submit button telling people that if they don’t put something relevant their link will be removed.
I personally think that everyone should have do follow links in their blogs. But a major concern that I had was the spam i would receive…..And i was right! It got to the point that i was spending 80% of my time moderating comments. My advise is to enable it and then get a spam plugin, worked great for me.
Ste
I like it alot, does anyone can recommed someone to install it or what is the best settings to avoid spam?
I just found out the meaning of the keywordluv and i think its great to reward your replyers with this! keep it up!
I like the do follow tags with both comment luv and keyword luv. This way websites and blogs have ways to get more links and add to conetnt of the blog they post on. The fact you can use name then keyword makes it so much better than old comments and comment luv showing latest blogs posts is great way to get new post indexed and some traffic.
Stephen thanks for the post.
I think that if you get bad comments like: nice post, or hey there, you should just delete them. What is the point to these level of comments.
Some comments however can be quite insightful and offer value to the blog. The keywordluv blog movement will certainly bring more eyes to your blog. I have found a few that I intend to revisit often.
Keywordluv is a new one on me, and a great idea I think it is too! Might put it on one of my blogs myself. Thanks
I use kimmo (http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/dofollow/)
Its best I can manage & I agree with Brian – at least talk or discuss or make some points like author will not think that you are spam.
If you spend good 10 minutes while reading post – definately you will have something to talk for.
LINK REMOVED: because of failure to use KeywordLuv syntax (name@keywords)
The best way to fight comment spam is to just roll through your comments from time to time and manually delete the spammers. On my real estate blog I have found that the most effective way to handle this problem. I wouldnt penalize everyone else with a no-follow becuase of some spammers.
I never heard about KeywordLuv, but it seems to be an easy way to protect against spam. Thanks for the tip.
It’s nice that you using keywordluv too because you are doing both attract your new readers and make them become loyal.
It seems that the do follow plugins do not hurt sites as much as some people say. Most seem to be ranked well with alot of traffic and comments. Since you need links from other sites and you let people comment you might as well allow follow links.
I think do follow is a great way to reward your readers. You also get more traffic on site and comments.
so… i’ve successfully used CommentLuv on my wordpress blog(s) and will investigate keyword luv. i think it’s worth the effort of dealing with spam to reward useful comments.
does anyone know of a similar tool for joomla sites?
do follow has proven to be quite useful for people to get blogging more active
It seems like the SEO spam mentioned above would be a hassle. However the SEO spammers gotta find your site somehow, which leads me to believe the more ‘nice post’ comments you get, the more links pointing your way. Yeah, it can be annoying, but it seems like a small price to pay considering the link juice gained in the process.
Ha, that is assuming they’re finding YOU via dofollow links.
The problem with do-follow is people will spam. If a blog is good enough then the blog owner won’t need to have do-follow because people will comment to put their point of view accross, not to gain a back link.
The BBC is a perfect example of this. There are no links in the forums and blogs, yet they have many users.
However, when a blog is starting and it wants to get a upper hand, their is no harm in attracting people who want do-follow links, because some will become hooked, so even if you change to no-follow, people will still comment.
I think do follow is a great way to reward your readers. You also get more traffic on site and comments.
No follow surely does attract lot’s of peoples looking for links and majority is black hatters with lots of spammy links. But Askimet an reCAPTCHA plugins seems to be doing a great job. So what I suggest is, if your blog is new and want some interaction than use NoFollow for some time and after a while you can always turn it off if you don’t want to or if it’s overwhelming.
I personally don’t think it matters for building links. I have do-follow on my blog. Love to encourage extra comments.
LINK REMOVED: because of failure to use KeywordLuv syntax (name@keywords)
to be honest…i hate no follow links…thats so mean…isn’t it?
I found your blog by searching for wordpress nofollow information. I use a lot of wordpress for my stuff and I am trying to decide if it’s better to turn the nofollow off so that when I link back and forth to my own stuff there is some kind of benefit or just leave it off and not worry about it. I have a lot of links to my sites from nofollow and from dofollow. To be honest I have not noticed a huge difference either way. I wonder if Yahoo and MIcrosoft use it for anything in their search scoring?
Disabling nofollow will get you more traffic – and that’s what a blog needs to survive. Just notice all the above comments for proof.
Thanks for the great tips, which I could have added to the post, but I didn’t want it to get too complex. Give someone too many directions to go in the beginning and they will get caught up in the details. Thanks again, though. The comment section is a good place for extra tips and by leaving it as simple as I thought I could, it leaves a lot of room for you and others to come in and add more suggestions.
U have the best plugin that can stop spamming and people can give links…it is also allow people to put their keywords….thank you for ur support (means people have mis conception about no follow,I also do not like no follow)….
In comments people can give links to relevant post…they can discuss about that also..it is very good…..
U have the best plugin that can stop spamming and people can give links…it is also allow people to put their keywords….thank you for ur support (means people have mis conception about no follow,I also do not like no follow)….
In comments people can give links to relevant post…they can discuss about that also..it is very good…..
WP is the way to go. It seems they have a plug in for just about everything. I use both WP and Blogger blogs and WP is by far the best blogging platform. The do-follow movement is the best thing for bloggers to support each other.