The Eco-Center of WordPress.com
I like to sign comments on other blogs, and I’m always kind enough to actually read people’s posts and reply to them. I just commented on one of the WordPress.com blogs which are listed in the Dashboard’s area. There I noticed upon checking the source code that they apparently implement for all off-site links the nasty and disgusting rel=’external nofollow‘ element in their A HREF-Tags. What’s that supposed to be? Am I not good enough? I understand to be marked as „external“, but facing the „nofollow“ argument upsets me. Especially in the case of being a registered user, it makes no sense to insult me like that.
I’d burn anyone down to hell for doing such to me – if I could. But here sanity strikes back again, I’ll leave it as it is. However, I already used my user name and have manually edited the URL from my BeLoved blog to lead to my main blog here at the MikeSchnoor.com. This is not a wrong move of keeping your profile up-to-date, or is it an act of evilness if you enter something else than a xyz.wordpress.com account? Further, it is not leading to any problematic spam because I have been officially invited with a Golden Ticket to WordPress.com! So where’s the point of that? I wonder if I should write a Feedback on this or rather not to waste time on this…
Reality is that if you have a full version of WordPress after 1.5 or a wordpress.com blog, all links in comments get „nofollow“. You can read about why on the WordPress Codex.
After all, isn’t part of the idea of leaving comments is to also get people interested in who you are and what you are blogging about so they might blog about you and what you are blogging about? ;-) That assumption trumps the nofollow issue.
But if you are just going for link popularity through comments, then you are considered one of the comment spammers on the net.
Sure, there could be a compromise, but how do you compromise when it’s hard to know who is who and when commenters are being honest and sincere and when they are abusing them method. So WordPress takes the ultra conservative point of view.
In other words, make sure your content is the best it can be so when someone comes to visit, they will want to link or write about you. Consider commenting on comments an invite to visit.
True! I forgot that WordPress has this as you said ultra conservative point of view! I’m just so used to the customizable free-version of WordPress that I’ve just had this „Why me?!“ feeling.
Yep, you’ve made the point on that matter, Lorelle. ;) I admit I’ve installed one of these „dofollow“ plugins for my WordPress 1.5.2. a long time ago, and preferably keep it active.
Probably, I’m one of the ones who criticized a few months ago the nofollow tag – because of the original rumors concerning Google doing a re-rating of blogs to filter their index?! But nevertheless, I’ll stick to my point: I prefer to keep my blog free from nofollow tags, and I’m always visiting my commenter’s urls unless they’re busted off by BadBehavior already.
Actually, I prefer the „opt in“ approach to handling links. When I write an entry, I actively decide which links get the „nofollow“ atribute and which ones don’t. With comment links open (and without the attribute for them), I defy that very conscious preselection.
It’s as simple as that: If a commenter makes a good point, then a few of the other readers will look up his site. If what they find there is to their liking, some of them will link to that site, be it in a blog entry or in the link list. And THAT’s exactly how i want Google’s relevance equation to work.