Say No to nofollow

When I decided to remove the nofollow tag from comments on this blog, I wondered whether this would be a sound decision to make. The primary reason was that many of the A-list bloggers have nofollow enabled, the fact that Wordpress and other blogging platforms incorporated this by default put me off more. Luckily for me, I decided to dig into it some more and what I learned convinced me to remove the nofollow tag on this blog. Wordpress, Six Apart and the rest of the platforms that enforced the nofollow tags were said to have done so under considerable pressure from Google back in early 2005. Surprisingly, Google is known to follow the links but not to index them. Yahoo, on the other hand, follows and indexes the links. So much for “nofollow”.

The do follow/no nofollow/I follow movement was started by Randa Clay quite recently in early 2007. The movement is gaining quite some momentum now and I was pleasantly surprised to know that Chris Garett has a “do follow” plugin installed. I’m sure more A-list bloggers will soon follow suit.

Personally, I feel its a lot about trusting your readers - there are bound to be comment spammers, but if I can pass on link-juice to a reader who comments on an article that helps the discussion, I choose to do it. That said, leaving a comment with the name “Make Money Online” would really be pushing the limit, so if you decide to leave a comment, it is much appreciated, but please leave it under your real name!

Update: Just found a drupal project that blacklists all sites that add a nofollow tag on their outgoing links. It would be interesting to find a similar plugin for Wordpress!