Backlash Against Large Sites Using NoFollow Begining?
Even though it’s rare that I add new plugins these days, I still subscribe to the feed from WordPress Plugins DB. One plugin caught my eye yesterday, which appears to have been designed to counter big sites like Wikipedia not giving link love.
The WordPress Blog SEO plugin automatically adds the ‘nofollow’ tag to any links it spots to sites that have benefited immensely from blogs linking to them, but add ‘nofollow’ to their own external links i.e. they don’t share the link love. I think the plugin author is hoping that enough blogs install the plugin, the big sites will sit up and take notice.
Sites included on the list are:
addthis.com,
blinklist.com, blogger.com,
del.icio.us,
facebook.com,
google.com,
linkter.hu,
ma.gnolia.com,
netvouz.com,
segnalo.alice.it, simply.com, shadows.com, startaid.com, stumbleupon.com,
thisnext.com,
wikipedia.org,
yahoo.com, youtube.com
I share the author’s frustrations about big sites using ‘nofollow’ and not sharing the link love, particularly as many of them have got to where they have because of blogs, but I don’t reckon much to his chances of getting them to change their policy.
A more meaningful campaign for bloggers I feel is the ‘U Comment I Follow’ campaign. Since I joined the number of comments left on this site has nearly doubled. Although some of the comments haven’t had the quality of previous comments, hopefully getting more comments will lead to more lurkers getting involved with this blog.
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Comment by Marc on 10 December 2007:
It’s amazing how many webmasters don’t even know about “nofollow.” They believe that every link to their site give them a higher page rank, so they go on every possible forum, social networking site, blog, etc., assuming that they will boost their page rank from all those posts they do. Still, it’s not a bad idea to use this strategy, at the very least for some old-fashioned public relations. Even if the links don’t boost page rank, their name is getting out there with each link added.
Comment by Peter Cruickshank on 20 September 2007:
Google almost definitely does not ignore nofollow. I really think captchas would solve the spam problem much more effectively, especially if combined with moderation (and maybe a ranking system like the ones on slashdot or digg). Nofollow does little besides discouraging discussion.
Comment by shortship on 4 September 2007:
Well, I can see where nofollows come from. According to google, whatever links are on your site, this counts as an ‘endorsement’ from you. If you do not put the links there, you cannot vouch for them. Outbound links to spam pages can hurt your own page ranking, etc.
Now, that being said, in a perfect world, users would not be running spam pages, and all readers of your blog would just be linking back to their own blog, where they may have even given you some link love by continuing the topic of the conversation on their own page.
Wikipedia though… nofollows leave a bad taste in my mouth. It would be like if you the blogger wrote about some topic from another article, and nofollowed *that* link. Wikipedia is copying (in many cases, merely just rewording, like a 4th grade book report) valuable information found online, and then BAM, now wikipedia ranks higher than you do in all searches, even though they just took your in depth research and claimed it as their own. And what do you have to show for it? It used to give you a boost in rank, but now.. it really just hurts you. It’s pretty disgusting. Especially when so many spammers of wikipedia are caught and policed for adding their own links, I do not see how nofollows add anything to the table.
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