So I’m trolling around the net looking for “dofollow” blogs, the latest thing to do to build traffic, and I find this site with a list of 562 dofollow blogs in RSS format.  Sweet.  Let’s face it, I have been trying the whole Adsense, Adwords, affiliate marketing thing for about 2.5 years now and I don’t drive a Lexus and I don’t have 5 hot blonds in my non-existant hottub.  But I keep plugging along mostly because it’s cool technology and an interesting…sorta…challenge.

I’m browsing through the list and find the following blog that I click
cause
it’s got
a wacky nameI click cause it’s got a wacky name…The Pasty Muncher.  Wacky names are the shit.

I’m browsing along again looking at the site for something interesting and here we are.

Why I dofollow – say no to rel = no follow | The Pasty Muncher

I like links. I like to recieve links and being a generous so and so I’m happy to give them.

This brings up in my mind the entire “nofollow” vs. “dofollow” linking strategy…or the fancy name “traffic shaping”.

I think I have something to say on the subject.

I check the blog, sure enough, it’s dofollow. Then I start checking around and I notice that my brand spanking new WordPress 2.7 blog is nofollow. Seems that is the default these days from the fine folks at WordPress. Quality product, trying to cut down on link SPAMW, I get it. However, the entire Internet is built on the premise of hyperlinking and as The Pasty Muncher says it here:

Links form the chain that holds the web together.

Tim Berners LeeW the genius that invented the world wide web believes the future of Semantic Web holds immense potential for how machines will collaborate in the coming days. Collaborate=link? Fancy word play on an old theme?

Why did this whole nofollow thing come about? Well the Google gods, who do no evildo no evil, decided in 2005 to try and cut down on the link SPAM that was flooding the blogosphere to increase PageRank on the SPAMing sites. Hey, we love it, right? It’s good because Google did it right (maybe another time)?

Official Google Blog: Preventing comment spam

1/18/2005 04:28:00 PM
If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, 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, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Anyway, fast forward to 2009 and it’s now the default setting on WordPress 2.7. How much do you want to bet that it’s not long before all major blogging platforms have it on their commenting systems? How long before it’s woven into the fabric of all sites? And finally, how much do you want to bet that it actually does count in the Grand Algorithm of the Google?

Frankly, a link is a link is a link. Akismet and other solutions are working fairly well and you shouldn’t try and stop good old fashion moderation of sites by their administrators anyway.

I’ll finish up right now with this quote from one of the commentators on The Pasty Muncher:

I agree 100% I have written a number of posts about NoFollow, which is a principle I basically have a problem with. It tells the search engines that you are too lazy to moderate your own comments. When the search engines rank the blogs to serve to their searchers, surely NoFollow is one way for search engines to know which blogs NOT to rank highly.

p.s. David Leonhardt is the name of the commentator and he writes a SEO Marketing Blog, the SEO Marketing Express. Here is his article on the Nofollow attribute.

 
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dofollow, google, nofollow, Ramblings, SEO