Wed 8 Jul 2009
I’m Killing Nofollow On This Blog. Completely. Comments & Trackbacks.
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo)Shortly, I’ll be killing nofollow on this blog. I’ve already started hacking Hobo Custom Link Love For Wordpress (free to download).
I’m killing rel=nofollow…. EVERYWHERE. Soon, even trackbacks will be followed, meaning if you link to this blog, and you are a genuine site and in turn you’re not linking to spam, I’ll link back. I’ve already started if you look at the Hobo blog home page you’ll find nofollow is gone. Only one or two nofollowed links remain to my Feedburner account etc. I’m considering what to do with those.
But I am on a mission to kill nofollow on the Hobo site. I love blogging and I love SEO.
How will I prevent spam you ask? I’ll obsessively moderate as I do anyway and out stupid spammers viciously. Try and hurt my site and I will out you.
Is this for everybody? I don’t think so – I’d say it was for ‘power bloggers lol – those with a bit of experience and I guess that includes me now. Nofollow was never intended for a site like mine – I don’t pump spam into Google or sell links that pass PR on this blog and I watch who I link to. Newbie bloggers need to know however what Google thinks about bad neighbourhoods!
Details coming soon…..
Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)
Ok. Good to know that. But do let us know how this experiment goes on. It would be better to know the impact on google ranking/traffic pre nofollow and post nofollow changes. As for me, I would not take that risk since my blog is just 10 days old.
What a good idea Shaun, I commend you for this initiative …
I am a newbie to online blogging, but have already had quite a few spammers …
I too would love to know how this affects your ranking and traffic,
please keep in touch and let us know.
Cheers
Michele
Alok, There is no risk if you moderate comments and watch who you link to.
What should we call ourselves? I too have removed all the nofollows on my site *minus the FB links, weird..
Will you be adding some sort of blacklist to the link love plugin? A way to update a server with known bad ips, email addresses and domains would be cool.
Good idea
But Moderation will be the key, Jim
You got balls!
Hi.
If this is a blog with a lot of comments, don’t you think the time to moderate the comments will take a lot of your time?
What is the crucial reason to apply this changes?
Thanks,
Leandro.
Excellent Shaun, glad someone is taking a stand and giving the opportunity for newbies and seasoned bloggies a chance to get some decent links.
I for one will be adding a link now to HOBO SEO on my main blog and another on a seperate blog. Spread the link love!
I’m interested to see how this pans out. Personally I think you are going to waste too much time moderating a lot of nonsense spam and that you would make more money putting that time into something more productive. There is close to zero chance of me removing nofollow from any of my bigger blogs. Some of them I have edited not to give links at all.
you make a couple of good points Phil
I spend a lot of time in my blog at night anyway (on my on time – I’m sad that way) – that’s why I am not to worried about it
Anyway I have a few staff I can make take over if it becomes a prob lol
Yeah. Moderating comments is really PITA ( I don’t have any flagship blog with traffic yet but whatever different niche(read mini spam) blogs I have , the spammy comment just make me shudder what will happen once I have blog with traffic. I think managing 50-100 emails in a day itself is tough and then if we have to manage the comments, it will surely burn a major chunk of time.
Okay I’ve decided to make a 180 and allow comments on my new blog. I’ve installed your plugin so we’ll see how it goes. On a smaller blog I’m hoping it won’t add any real work.
i had also made my personal blog nofollow free few months back and really enjoyed getting lots of readers but with many spammers as well lol. You can of course just set wordpress comment settings to ‘Comment author must have a previously approved comment’. Good Luck moderating comments of your blog!