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Fading Out Nofollows?  (View post)

Martin Terre Blanche [PersonRank 1]

Sunday, April 15, 2007
17 years ago15,374 views

I like the idea of fading out no-follow very much. As a matter of interest, have you considered making your blogging platform (I seem to remember that it is something you created yourself) available for others to use?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

This blog source carries some history – one random example, I'm still supporting URL structures which were only necessary for the time I worked with Blogger – so I'd probably recreate it from scratch. (I did write another from scratch which is more like a "package" or module, you can see the output at http://schlechtbedient.de)

Jon Henshaw [PersonRank 4]

17 years ago #

It seems like it would be easy to do for most platforms. If a comment's timestamp is a certain date/time, then add nofollow. Otherwise, do nothing.

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Not everyone monitors the comments for old posts and sometimes it's hard to tell if a link is spam or not. In other cases, the comment mixes good links with bad links and I can't edit it.

Jason Schramm [PersonRank 5]

17 years ago #

I force all comments on my site to be moderated, and I have nofollow off. So I remove bad links. I would love a wordpress plugin that could let me choose which comments to nofollow and which to not.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

> Not everyone monitors the comments for old posts

There should be an alert system that lets you know when older threads receive new comments. I believe good blogging platforms already have this...

> sometimes it's hard to tell if a link is spam or not. In
> other cases, the comment mixes good links with bad
> links and I can't edit it.

Well, I think you should be able to edit comments, e.g. unlink a link where you're unsure if it's spam, or remove a link you know is spammy but leave the rest of the comment if it makes sense. It seems a good blogging system should have this too...

Thomas Rosenstand [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Hi!
There actually is a plugin for Wordpress that allows you to remove the nofollow tag case by case – and it works perfect on my weblog: http://www.fob-marketing.de/marketing-blog-247-mini-update-fuer-nofollow-case-by-case.html

The plugin allows you to moderate a comment and simply place a "dontfollow" after the URL. If you do this, the nofollow attribute will be automatically attached to the specific comment. Works like a charm at my place, where I wish to place a nofollow at certain comments.

It is downloadable here – the page is in German, but it works great at an English Wordpress installation.

Adam Lasnik [PersonRank 2]

17 years ago #

I believe that the thoughtful use of nofollow in cases like this is a win for everybody, and I hope more Webmasters (especially those of large sites) will explore these sort of balanced options.

JohnMu [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I really like http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/dofollow/ (WordPress plugin) – it lets you fade out nofollows after a certain time automatically.

JLH has a great linking-guideline page in his blog that details how he does it (also using that plugin). http://www.jlh-design.com/nofollow-policy/

Aaron Bassett [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

I talked about this exact same problem and solution a while ago and have gone so far as to include a wordpress plugin which automatically removes nofollow from links etc after 24hrs (giving me time to remove any obvious spam)

My full post about it is at http://foobr.co.uk/2007/02/has_nofollow_failed/

Joost de Valk [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

The dofollow plugin for WordPress supports this kind of fading :)

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Iwish trackbaks URLs can be treated in the same manner..

t xensen [PersonRank 4]

17 years ago #

I have nofollow turned off on my sites, but for people who aren't willing or able to moderate all their comments the fadeout seems a good solution.

Hoarding PR by defaulting to nofollow is bad karma.

Aaron Bassett [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

[put at-character here]/pd the dofollow plugin for wordpress I talk about in my blog link above or that other people have mentioned here in the comments manages your trackbacks as well as links in comments.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

[Edit: added the word "automatically" to the post.]

Scott Reynen [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Alternate suggestion, just use hAtom:

http://log.makedatamakesense.com/2007/04/15/hatom-makes-rel-nofollow-irrelevant/

Owen Cutajar [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

I've recently joined a movement called i-Follow which is a group of bloggers who believe that comments construe a conversation on your blog and as-such should be followed. More on my blog here: http://www.u-g-h.com/index.php/2007/04/12/the-i-follow-movement/

Henri van den Hoof [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

I'm also using the Semiologic DoFollow-plugin and have also added the i-Folow logo Owen is refering to, to my blogs sidebar at http://www.marketingland.nl . As far as I'm concerned they can integrate the functionality of this plugin in Wordpress itself for wider spead usage.

Aaron Wall [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Even with nofollow I removed the URL box alltogether because I was getting so many spammy comments.

I think the fallout from wasting time on spam was causing me to assume the worste even on some legitimate comments. The fact that my blog is about SEO and beginners frequent it often probably makes my blog more spam prone than mose.

Gea-Suan Lin [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

WordPress has "DoFollow" plugin to do such thing:
http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/dofollow/

Danz [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Nofollow is the devil's spawn. Based on the initial hype, I implemented it on my site. Of course, there was no reduction in spam which was one of the early promises. After much study, I've come to believe that it was pushed by the search engines to remedy the blogs-are-too-highly-ranked "problem." If all blogs implemented it across the board, there would be a huge reduction in the number of links to blogs with the corresponding reduction in their search engine rank. I've eliminate it and encourage others to do the same. Towards that end, fading out nofollows is great!

www.DanzFamily.com

Ross Mayfield [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

the problem with nofollow for wikis is authorship isn't as distinct as a blogger and a commenter. fading seems to make a bit more sense, if you assume active gardening.

Andy Beard [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

If you want to reference a full list of dofollow and nofollow solutions (there are reasons for that), then I have been compiling a comprehensive list for a couple of months, and where solutions were not easily available, encouraging experts on the various platforms to publish solutions.

http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/ultimate-list-of-dofollow-plugins-banish-nofollow-from-comments-and-trackbacks.html

If anyone has any other solutions, feel free to ping me and get a followable link and listed on the page.

We also now have a community site hosted on Bumpzee.

Allowing followable links from within the comments isn't strictly the same as full support for dofollow. The author links on this site point to a search of their previous comments, not directly to their site.

Emil Stenström [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

> Why should outgoing links in comments (or wiki pages, for that matter) be considered less valuable than links from blog posts?

I'd say it's still a good idea to keep them nofollowed. The fact is that the authors link very rarely has anything whatsoever to do with the contents of the article he's commenting on. That alone makes nofollow a good way to divide your page into relevant and irrelevant links.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

When I think of "comment URLs" I think of (relevant) links that commenters post, not their homepage. When there's a positive post on CompanyXyz.com and the commenter balances this by also pointing out the benefits of competitor CompanyABC.net, then I think this deserves to become a real link after a while.

John Honeck [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

There is also the issue of source attribution. If you've got a popular blog with a lot of commenters, they are writing a lot of the content, and should receive some sort of credit for it. Sure I may write the first 20 sentences but the 100 commenters make the blog post what it is, on my site, with me getting the traffic, the least i can do is let people know where they can read more about the contributers. And If I am willing to allow my traffic to follow a link to their site, I should also allow search engines view it as a vote for that site, otherwise I'll remove the comment and the link. If I'm going to use their efforts at writing content for my site, I'm going offer link credit if they ask for it.

Just one man's opinion.

Emil Stenström [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

[put at-character here]Philipp Lenssen: Then I agree, comments should be considered content, I just wanted a clear distrinction between author urls and relevant urls in the comments.

Andy Beard [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

There is always a clear distinction between the two, because all the major search engines also look at RSS feeds, and compare the difference.

If people are worried about Google Juice loss, there are ways to mitigate it on your most popular posts by increasing the number of internal links dynamicly based on the number of comments and trackbacks.

One thing people rarely do is use a link to a relevant page for their name link – I always do it, frequently to tag pages or specific articles.
Deep links are good no matter what anchor text is being used and it is good for the site owner as well.

From what I have seen, most of the people who leave a website link in comments have related sites, and it is still only a fraction of the links on my pages.

Bernie Zimmermann [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

http://www.bernzilla.com/item.php?id=810

Great minds think alike, apparently ;)

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