Mike Haydon

In writing the Death of NoFollow post, I came across a great post by Dixon Jones on how to go about removing the automatic nofollowing of comments in Wordpress.

Going noFollow free in the comments raises several issues, the chief of which is spam. That ugly thing where low-life types try to take advantage of anything in their way to promote whatever they promote. My solution is as follows:

• Use the Akismet plugin that comes preinstalled with wordpress 2.5.1 (if you aren’t using this or later, why not? Upgrade already! ).
• Turn comment moderation on for every comment. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it’s better to moderate 100 worthwhile comments than to let one x rated comment through, IMO
• Install Delink Comment Author by Alex King… This allows you to keep those comments that say “nice post” without the nasty X rated link
• Install the NoFollow Free plugin. This removes the auto “nofollow” tag from comments on a wordpress blog

The major positive in going nofollow free on your comments is that you aren’t being stingy with your “link love”. Whether or not it actually give any value is dubious, as I have said before, but because nofollow is so entrenched in many people’s minds, perhaps going nofollow free will make others more inclined to comment, if they KNOW the search engine spiders will check out their site through the link they get by commenting on your post.

So what do you think? Workable solution? Do you propose a better one?

PS If you are using Firefox, there’s an addon from Search Status that allows you to turn on highlighting of nofollowed links, so you can see exactly what’s going on. Check it out, I nofollowed the above link just so you could see it in action

Popularity: 55%

One of the central pillars of SEO until now has been the html “nofollow” tag. It is used to direct “link juice” to flow where you want it to. Many people in SEO (including myself) are liberal users of this tag. It ties in with the whole PageRank debate and whether PageRank is relevant anymore.

You know what a “nofollow” tag looks like… <a href=”…” rel=”nofollow”… >. It is a signal to a search engine spider that it must not leave the site to check out that link. The tag has been used for things like affiliate links, links to authority sites like wikipedia (on the theory that they have enough PageRank) and comments on blogs.

I have been wrestling with this issue for some time… now that the web is changing, with Web 2.0 being the way of the future, perhaps the heyday of “nofollow” is at an end. At the very least, I think that it should occupy a much lesser role than it has.

The web and SEO is shifting away from former strongholds, such as just trying to get first ranking on Google, to being focussed on traffic… alone… That’s a big step, because all of a sudden your strategy has to change from on-page optimization to off-page, when it comes to links. The strategy must at least consider the wealth of traffic available from sites like digg.com, stumbleupon.com, del.icio.us, etc.

The entire purpose of the internet is to connect, whether to connect sites, people, places or things. The “nofollow” tag disrupts the connection of sites to give the webmaster more control over the flow of search engine traffic.

As a result, I have decided that I am no longer going to use “nofollow” tags in my links. The decision was triggered today when I realized that using “nofollow” is a “scarcity mentality”, rather than an “abundance mentality”. Sure, you can argue that there really is only so much PageRank coming into the page, so a scarcity mentality is justified, but that is taking too narrow a view of the page.

By leaving off the “nofollow” tag, people are more likely to appreciate it when you link to them. What are they going to do about it? In today’s web 2.0 world, if you have quality content, it is very possible that such a person would digg your page, add it to del.icio.us, stumbleupon it, etc, which is going to boost your traffic. Why wouldn’t they? A portion of any boost in traffic or PageRank they give to your page is going to flow through to theirs.

At the very least, using the “nofollow” tag is becoming redundant. The question remains whether it will become counter-productive…

Could this, then, be the death of the “nofollow” tag?

Check out what the rest of the world thinks…

• SEO has no future


• Google Follows Nofollowed Links in SEOmoz Comments?


• You’d Be Wise To “NoFollow” This Dubious SEO Advice


• Nofollow sculpting my take


• I’ve gone nofollow free… Good or bad thing?


• So What Links Should you Nofollow?


• Why your nofollow testing sucks


• PageRank & Link Basics


• Site Sculpting with the nofollow attribute: Clever SEO or Spam 2.0?

And my favourite… (make sure to read Jack Humphrey’s comments on the post… FYI Jack created TrackBoost)

• TrackBoost Sucks for SEO

Popularity: 100%

I have moved all my indoor soccer match reviews to www.mike-russ-monty.com. I will be posting all future match reviews to that site.

I was reflecting on the direction of this site and I felt that the match reviews clashed with my intentions for this site. www.mike-russ-monty.com has RSS and you can sign up for email updates. www.mikehaydon.com will be reserved for posts on areas such as internet marketing, SEO, Web 2.0, etc, like the headline says. www.mike-russ-monty.com is a fun site (which you can tell just by looking at the design). I have worked hard at providing an optimal solution for my readers and I feel this is the best way to go.

I am also working on an exciting project in the fitness industry. It’s almost ready to be revealed, but I don’t want to jump the gun just yet. Stay tuned…

Popularity: 38%