I just stopped using nofollows in the site structure of searchwritten.com. It’s not that I think nofollows are useless or that I’m afraid that Google will one day see it as ‘over optimization’.
But as an SEO who has full control over my own website, I shouldn’t really need artificial techniques like nofollowing. Instead, I should focus on a good site structure.
I’m still learning WordPress and haven’t actually done anything yet to make the SEO of this website better (it’s not a priority to me), but will get to that eventually. When the time comes, I won’t be needing nofollows. And I don’t want to.
p.s.: i DID implement nofollowing to alll comments. I talked to my colleague Joost about this and his vision in this is one i definiteley like: if commenters leave good comments, he blogs about them. So will I.
p.p.s.: when the structure of this site is optimized, I will probably nofollow the very expensive affiliate links I’m going to sell ;)
June 9th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Hmm. Unless you have a site a big as Johnon (Andrews) or someone of that order, you would have no time to edit (bulk) comments. If seo is not your main concern, just delete the spammers and let the juice flow feely I say.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Hi Simme, well I already get a bunch spam comments every day. And as searchwritten grows it will only be more and more. I really hate that. And i hate wasting time with it. I really truly hate commentspam.
June 11th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Hi Ramon from a Chicago SEO, who will disagree with you a little bit
#1 You nofollow every common element on this blog, sociable plugin links, comments and even your footer links giving credit to wordpress and designers etc. SO yea you do care a even if just a little bit :-)
#2) Tell me one reason why you should not nofollow, say, Google Search Results when Google itself puts a robots.txt to it. There are ways to automate nofollowing deadends with a simple plugin. Just my 2 cents on the issue.
June 11th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Hi Mert,
nice to meet you,
#1: very true. i DO care; it’s just that I noticed that when i installed wordpress, I was so lazy in implementing the nofollow plugin that i didn’t bother to optimize properly ;)
#2 this nofollowing was a plugin also that automated it
June 11th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Nice to meet you too. P.S. I am a Turkish American so I hope Turkey meets Holland in the finals. Man you guys stumped over the Italians so good. Made me wanna cry with joy.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Hehehe :) That was very nice indeed. The Dutch also have a score to settle with the Portuguese, so we’ll see what happens to our common enemy ;)
June 18th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Speaking of spammers. Who loves spammers? No one. They are the side effect on the internet. On one of my Wordpress powered blogs I used to get tons of spam. Finally, I ended up with premoderation of comments with 2 or more links and a black list of stop words. Comments that contain let’s call them “adult” and “farmacy” words, are deleted automatically. Comments with stop words that may somehow be relevant to the theme of the blog, are suspended for moderation. And yes, I had to ban hotmail.com as spammers’ service.
June 18th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
I’m thinking about writing a ‘blog policy’ here. By default i nofollow but that does not mean that i don’t WANT to give linkjuice. It’s just that i want to keep it under my control.
That is why i like the vision of my colleague: if a commenter writes good stuff, i’ll give hem/her linklove in a post (that sounds a bit odd, wbut you know what i mean ;))
June 18th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I believe from an SEO point of view the only comment that deserves credit is a non-scraper trackback. on a blog post comments section. If you want ot actually selectively remove nofollow tags for good comments check out the Greg Boser selective dofollow plugin.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
@Mert: good tip. I think i’ll certainly use that, especially for people who consequently place good comments. There is plugin that allows you to dofollow everyone who has placed more than, say, 10 comments, but i’ve heard of stories that spammers simply lookup that threshold, and then start spamming. So a VERY selective dofollow plugin probably is a good idea :)