Two years ago today, we released WordPress version 1.5. This was a pretty major release that introduced several new features that are still major staples of the current 2.1 branch: the Dashboard, Themes, and Pages. It also added a minor new change which was mildly controversial to some: comments were automatically flagged with the ‘nofollow’ attribute.
The rel="nofollow" idea had good intentions: to give content producers a way to link to another site without implying that they approve of it. The way it works is that if Google, or Yahoo!, or any other service that uses this standard sees a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link, they will ignore it. They don’t follow the link, and they don’t count the link in the destination site’s ranking calculations. One of the main use cases (as in WordPress’ case), was to reduce the effectiveness of comment spam, because the spammers would not get any “Google Juice” out of the links. Hurray for our side! We just stuck our finger in the spammer’s eye!
Unfortunately, we also tweaked the eyes of our regular readers, most of whom could probably use a little of that Juice. “Oh well,” we said. “That’s just the price we have to pay for a little peace of mind.” Well, most of us said that. Some were adamantly opposed to the nofollow idea. Many of us knew that it was just a bandaid, and that it wouldn’t really deter spammers from trying, it would just reduce their ability to get high rankings in search engines.
At the time, comment spam was a pretty major problem on many blogs, and there weren’t many effective remedies. It seemed like all of us spent the beginning of each day going through our comment queue, manually deleting the garbage that made it through the gauntlet of whatever defenses we did have in place. So, nofollow was the last-ditch attempt to deny satisfaction to the spammers when our other measures failed. But it did not discriminate. It had no way to know whether it was de-juicing a good guy or a bad guy. (Eric Meyer had some good thoughts on this subject, BTW.)
These days, many sites have better anti-spam measure in place. Akismet has been very effective, and many WordPress users swear by Spam Karma 2. With measures like these in place, hardly any spams ever make it through to be displayed on your blog. And if they do, hopefully you delete them pretty quickly after they appear. So, that’s even better than just telling search engines not to index their links. They can’t index something that they never see in the first place, right?
With that in mind, I’ve installed Kimmo Suominen’s dofollow plugin here, and configured it to remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute from comment links after two days. The two day limitation is to account for the occasional hiccup where spam might make it through over a weekend, and I don’t get to delete it immediately. The important thing is that I’ll be giving back the Juice to the comments that get to stay here. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, and you feel like comment spam is under control on your site, I encourage you to do the same.
i Still use no follow just to reduce spamming eventhough i use akismet too.
thanks for the information.
it is of little use to me, nevertheless, it's good to know new stuff ;]
Its really true that nofollow link will not work properly.I decided not to use and have to remove no follow in use.
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muthu
Social Bookmarking
My experiense says me that “nofollow” tag dosnt really stop spammers, but it stops sometimes normal commentors. So, it’s better to “dofollow”.
Real interesting article. I learn many from your blog, Askimet and Spam Karma help me from many spam.
I have to look into this plugin as my blog is still fairly new. Thanks for letting us know though, I never knew. What a great way to encourage conversations.
Namaste
-ohm
I think the dofollow is important. If somebody has something worthwhile to say about your product or article to help promote it then I think people should be rewarded with a link back.
I think the moderators should approve all the comments before they are added to a site. Then they can manually check for spam and approve the comments as well as read the comments that people have added.
Some blog authors prefer 7-days nofollow period.
That two day plugin seems like a pretty good compromise – you can still have dofollow, but it gives you a couple days to get rid of spam before they’re likely to get anything out of it…
I do think you might want to check out the “Nofollow Case by Case” Plugin for Wordpress. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-case-by-case/
Thanks for the do follow stuff. I have changed my blog to a do follow blog from a no follow blog. I am getting a little more comments and I am starting to get more spam comments, but at least it gets caught in my spam catcher.
thanks for the complete history lesson. I am a noob blogger. Learn new things everyday. hehehehe. i just change my blog to a do follow as well. and at the moment i dont get any spam yet and hopefully my spam karma can cathch it. hehe. thanks
“It would be impossible to promote our websites if everyone used no follow attributes.”
No it wouldn’t. There are plenty of ways to “promote” your website. But spamming your links into blogs like mine is not the way. I have no obligation to host your link. I will do so at my discretion and at my whim.
If someone posts a link in their comment that I don’t like, for whatever reason, I have no qualms about deleting the comment, flagging it as spam, or simply leaving the content of the comment, but deleting the link, as I’ve done to you.
My blog. My rules. As arbitrary as I care to make them. Nyah.
Anyhow, if you want to “promote” a commercial site, there are plenty of options. One obvious one would be to buy some links from an ad service like Google AdWords, Text Link Ads, or any number of other ad networks. If your site is non-commercial, then simply participating in relevant community site discussions in an intelligent, non-spammy way will generally do the trick.
I don’t come to your house and spraypaint my company’s logo on your wall, do I?
It would be impossible to promote our websites if everyone used no follow attributes.
Wouldn’t it be simpler if the blog software came with a choice, dofollow/nofollow. Then when you set up your blog you could choose, rather than having to go find a plugin that turns the comments into do follow. It can be very confusing for people who are just starting out.
This no follow option gives the powers that be, even more power.
I do not link my real estate site to any Websites that use the no-follow option.
after reading about this I installed dofallow on my site!
[...] read this last night, and now this and this, I have decided that I agree entirely and have added the dofollow plugin to [...]
Your automatic removal of nofollow isn’t working is it? EG Aldian Prakoso Posted 6/19/2007 has nofollow in the link. And others …
I think nofollow was a good idea as a basic antidote to spam marketing, but things have moved on since then and there are more sophisticated methods around now. Also, it should be in the hands of the individual blogger how comments are handled.
Every single link on the page is “nofollow” because of the meta robots tag:
Even if the links don’t have the nofollow attribute individually, the robots meta tag cuts any hope of passing link juice from this page.
Nice Information for Nofollow.. thanks
I’ll remove nofollow and let Akismet handle the spammers in my site.
I read it and I think you are right. You should write more about it.
I just realized that so many blogs around use the nofollow practice… it’s not-so-good.
Good read, I actually just added dofollow because of it. Thanks
As a new webmaster I was not aware of the difference in follow or nofollow, Does no follow mean a higher page rank because of less pagerank leakage? How would nofollow affect my incomming links, Do webmasters check for no-follow in the source code before linking. And even if they did how would it affect my site. Would I receive less targeted web traffic.
[...] Disables the automatic rel=”nofollow” attributes that get added to your external links. Dougal explains the whys and wherefores better than [...]
The 2 day limitation is absolutely brilliant – plenty of time to catch the spammers who are the only reason to not pass along the juice. Unfortunately, many people are laboring under the incorrect assumption that a link from them somehow detracts from their own PR, and this is a reason many folks use “nofollow”. I have even seen it on a links page where they traded with others! I have to assume it isn’t completely malicious, but sheer ignorance.
Maybe the next version of Wordpress could be DoFollow by default. Then let’s see how many versions of NoFollow plugins are developed.
Or better yet, more likely that one could develop a plugin that tweaks DoFollow under certain conditions, such as during moderation. The blog author could leave the link but apply NoFollow, maybe?
Hi Doug,
I finally removed nofollow today. Nofollow is irrelevant with comment spams. I let Askimet and Spam Karma to catch them
Is this plugin specific to Wordpress?
google has even gone so far as to say recently that all advertising links should include the use of the nofollow attribute in their attempt to regular the sale of links for PR purposes. Matt Cutt’s blog talks about this in great depth.
I have implemented this do follow in my blog and I think it is worthit since the comments on my blogs increases
There is also a little community that sounds like “U comment – I follow”, anyway I agree with you, I have recently installed it on my blog.
“With that in mind, I’ve installed Kimmo Suominen’s dofollow plugin here, and configured it to remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute from comment links after two days”
On my mind this is very great idea! It need to make a some “pressure” on Blogs nd GuestBook software’s manufacturers to implement this future as default setting.
May be more better to leave rel=”nofollow” in all posts, while they “not approved” by site owner or administrator via AdminPanel.
Thus, all nonmoderated blogs nd guestbooks cannot influence the SEPR!
I used similar idea at my russian forum, but the above idea is more flexible nd usefull.
If you do not object, I shall use it in my further projects.
Yeah us too – good bye nofollow. After researching the NoFollow tag I’m surprised it was introduced at all at any time. Who was it supposed to deter? Spammers don’t care if it is a human or spider that clicks on a link, so they will always keep trying to spam blogs – it costs them nothing to do it – they’re not exactly going to put in measures to avoid “nofollow blogs if their spam bot detects it are they?
[...] [NOFOLLOW] Follow you, follow me (dougal.gunters.org, 2 saves) [...]