Returning to NoFollow
Published December 20th, 2007 in UncategorizedAs some of you know this blog has been using the DoFollow plugin for several months to remove the nofollow tags on links to those who leave comments. The decision was originally made to encourage reader participation and to give something back to those who take the time to leave their feedback. The DoFollow status was never really promoted, so I am not sure how much of an influence it was to potential commenters.
Recently I have decided to de-activate the plugin and return to nofollow links. The amount of spam comments the past few months has really increased considerably. I don’t mind taking time to delete these comments, but I don’t like the idea that those who subscribe to comments are getting spam comments in their email. Hopefully this change will reduce the amount of spam that is left.
A bigger factor in the decision to go back to nofollow is the huge drop in search traffic within the past month. From July to mid-November search traffic had been steadily increasing. About 4 weeks ago traffic from Google was cut by about 75%. It happened basically overnight and has continued every day since that time. Over the course of the last 4 weeks this has caused a loss of about 5,000 visitors. I can’t say for sure, but I believe this blog is being penalized by Google for using DoFollow links, which goes against their recommendations. So, as a result of these factors any links that are left in the comments will no have nofollow tags.
Please feel free to leave your thoughts on this decision in the comments or use the contact form to send me a private message. Helping readers and commenters is still a priority to me, so if there is another way that I can help you, please let me know.
30 Responses to “Returning to NoFollow”
At one time I allowed comments to be dofollow but It has been awhile since I have switched to nofollow. I just prefer to think that anyone commenting on my blog is commenting because they want to comment. Not because they are intending on getting a back links from it.
That, and google’s stance on who you link out to on your site.
Hi Dustin,
As a regular commenter here, I’m glad that you aren’t bothered by the change. I pretty much feel the same as you. I always stood kind of in the middle on the issue. I initially decided to go DoFollow since I thought readers would like it, but I don’t think it made much of a positive difference.
Does not make much of a difference to me really. Afterall, you have been giving me lots of good resources to chew on in this awesome blog of yours, not to mention your linky loves in posts. I respect your decision.
Just as Dustin and pablopabla, I think it’s a good decision. I rarely write comments here, I’m just an enthusiastic reader and I think you will continue to have loads of comments here, from other enthusiastic readers !
I hope for you that this nofollow-change will bring you back in Master GG’s favors…
Hi Steven,
You already know my thoughts on this as like you I did the same not so long ago. It hasn’t negatively affected my comment numbers either I think and in the end, you need to do what is right for you.
I know, that we do blog for our readers benefit, but I really don’t think they mind and else they also don’t pay your bills for you. And unfortunately with Google’s regards on this issue you are better off now.
I think you did the right thing and I’m still commenting.
I never knew your blog was do-follow lol. For me, it doesn’t matter whether a blog is no-follow or do-follow. I’ll keep commenting as long as the blogger keeps providing great content…And I hope you get your Google traffic back…
We notice that people post dofollows and nofollows in our comments section. We’ve never really paid attention to how these people write their links or how we write our own links in other blogs.
I suppose what I’m asking is, should we just carry on as is? Should we install some sort of plugin? Should we alter how we write our html tags for links?
I am still doubting on this even though I have added back dofollow (my traffic from Google has always been low). The discussion point here is that although Google recommends that we shall nofollow as many links as possible, they now offer dofollow links from Blogger blogs via the comment section with the OpenID system now implemented.
What is Google playing with now?
I think it would be interesting to track the down turn (if any) in comments as a whole. If you’re posting frequency doesn’t change, did your % of comments/post and/or total # of comments drop? This would tell you if people were posting strictly for the juice. May make for an interesting blog post (HINT, HINT).
You may already be using it, but Akismet is great for stopping spam. I started getting a lot of spam recently and since implementing Akismet, it’s caught every message.
As for the nofollow. It’s completely up to you and I definitely don’t think it will stop people from commenting (it doesn’t me). But, for the same reason it doesn’t stop most people from commenting, it won’t stop a lot of the spammers from spamming. Whether you have dofollow or nofollow really doesn’t matter. To my knowledge the only way to check to see if nofollow is in effect is to view the source and look at the other comments. I highly doubt spammers are going to check and see, so it’s likely that they will continue to spam regardless of your setting.
That’s just my thoughts. Maybe add a captcha along with Akismet and see if that helps. It’s helped me a ton.
Steven, I never knew you had do-follow implemented, and it doesn’t matter to me. Most blogs don’t have a higher PageRank than me, anyways–it’s about the conversation.
Google isn’t penalizing links without no-follow unless they detect they are paid text links. Google may decrease your PageRank or even deindex you for selling paid text links or advertising without using no-follow.
The change you are experiencing in search traffic, as far as I can figure, shouldn’t have anything to do with whether or not you are no-following comment links. If you were deindexed, you would be getting no search referrals from Google. If your PageRank dropped, that might account for a decrease.
Google has recently made a change to how it will treat pages in its supplemental index. I’m not a full-blown professional SEO, but if I understand it, the idea behind the change is to allow pages in the supplemental index to appear more often in searches for more long-tail-like search terms. In other words, Google’s index just got mega-huge really fast.
Pablo and Mouki,
Thanks for taking the time to leave your comments here. I appreciate it.
Monika,
Yes, I’ve seen more and more people go back to nofollow in recent weeks/months. Each time I would read about it somewhere else I would think about doing it here, and the time eventually came.
Ruchir,
I’m not surprised you didn’t know. I think it was only ever mentioned in one post (when I first went DoFollow) and never again. I didn’t use the images/icons that are somewhat popular. My blog was listed in a few places as being a DoFollow blog and that is how some people knew about it. I contacted a few people to have the blog removed from their list so it doesn’t seem like I’m trying to be deceptive.
James,
If you’re using any of the major blog platforms comments will have nofollow tags by default. They won’t be removed unless you make some type of change. Readers can’t leave links without nofollow unless you install a plugin or enable it some other way. If you want to use nofollow tags like I am doing now you should leave the default settings.
Wayne,
I didn’t realize that the Open ID links on Blogger were DoFollow. There’s only a handful of Blogger blogs that I read and I don’t use the Open ID yet, so I really have no information on the matter.
Dan,
I agree. That is something that I might do in a month or so. I really doubt that it will have much influence. If comments drop it will probably be because of something I’m doing or not doing, not because of the nofollow tags. But I agree, some data could be interesting.
Deron,
Yes, I’ve always used Akismet and it does a good job. The spam comments that I had been getting (and it slowed down a good bit) appeared to be entered by a human and they didn’t contain a million links. I have Akismet set to hold in moderation any comment with 2 or more links, but many people would leave some meaningless comment with a link to some totally irrelevant, and sometimes objectionable, site. I can’t blame Akismet for that. I agree with you that it won’t stop spam. That’s one of the reasons I went DoFollow in the first place. Spam will always exist either way. But I think (and I have no proof) that some people were finding this blog listed as being a DoFollow blog and coming here just for a link. That’s the type of spam that I’m hoping to eliminate or minimize. And there is an easier way to tell if a link has nofollow or dofollow. There are Firefox Add-ons that show nofollow in a red box. I use one myself. So people can see pretty easily if they want to. Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate it.
Michael,
I know I’m not de-indexed and I’ve never sold links, so I’m good there. Yeah, I’ve read about the supplemental index changes, but I don’t think that’s the issue. The change in search traffic occurred before any of that, and I doubt that would have such a huge impact that it would cut my search traffic by 75%. I used to be getting consistent traffic to several specific blog posts day-after-day, week-after-week. No individual post or page got huge traffic, but added together it was pretty significant for me. That stopped all of a sudden one day. I can see in Google Webmaster Tools the search phrases that I am ranking for currently and what I was ranking for at specific times in the past. It suddenly changes a month ago and all of the phrases that were drawing consistent traffic and ranking well are now completely gone. I know Google has never said they are penalizing DoFollow blogs, but I’ve talked to a few others in recent weeks that have also had sizable drops. I don’t see any other reason that Google traffic can suddenly drop by that much and not return. I could definitely be wrong, but my opinion is that I have most likely been penalized. We’ll see. I really appreciate your comments and insight.
I could care less if you have nofollow removed or not, but I doubt you will see any decrease in spam comments. Most of the spam comments could care less if you have nofollow removed or not. They just want to get themselves in front of people. To bad you did not keep track of the number of spam comments for the last month or so to compare to the next month with nofollow turned on.
LGR,
I don’t think it will be much of a decrease in spam either. It was really only a few people that seemed to be coming here because of the DoFollow links. I think that point was over-emphasized in this post. I didn’t mean to say that I thought there would be a big drop and my life would be spam free. Thanks for commenting here regardless of the link situation.
Good point Steven. I didn’t think about that. I always forget about those great DoFollow lists that people seem to love to generate.
Deron,
Yes, so I guess from my perspective it’s not so much the quantity of spam (although I seem to have overemphasized that originally) as it is feeling like the DoFollow was being used and taken advantage of.
Doesn’t bother me at all, Steven.
It’s the content people should come here for, and not self-interest.
Keep up the great work!
PS. I’d love to see the ’subscribe to comments’ plugin used here.
I don’t believe in do-follow. If commentators are really interested about the blog article, he will comment even if the link to his website has a “nofollow tag”. I don’t think I’m going to install a do-follow plugin in the next 10 years lol…
I’m curious to know if you have noticed your search traffic increase since you made comments nofollow again.
I’m eventually going to attach a blog to my site, and some of the CMS ideas I’ve been looking at don’t use nofollow.
My initial thought was that I’d not necessarily prefer to have nofollow anyway, but I have seen more and more others going back to nofollow as the months go by.
I have seen huge increases in search traffic, but to be honest, in hindsight I’m not sure how much of it was related to this issue. I do think I was penalized by Google for something because I had a reduction in PageRank. I think the drop in search traffic had more to do with changing servers. I went from a server that displayed my site with www to a server that defaulted to no www, which essentially created duplicate content for Google. I inserted some code into the .htaccess file and slowly the search traffic grew. It’s now higher than it ever was. All things considered, I liked being dofollow while it lasted, but I haven’t regretted changing back to nofollow.
I hope for you that this nofollow-change will bring you back in Master GG’s favors
I think its a wise choice to your blog as a nofollow. If you do allow backlinks then have a good anti-spam plugin.
Hey, I’m a do-follow site. I am, mainly because I’ve never bothered to change it. However, since I started running captcha, I get no spam, so it is good for me to be do-follow. I don’t advertise it though. I have been thinking about advertising it. I actually found this entry while looking for badges. Now, once again, I’m on the fence and may not advertise it.
I think that whether you are no-follow or do-follow, there will still be bloggers who wish to comment on your site. If you are do-follow, then it might help our google ranking, but if you are no-follow it still helps us to be a part of the blogging community. Being part of the community is more important to me than getting a link back to my site.
Jason,
I liked being “do follow” but after the blog got listed on some sites as being a good place to get an easy link, I started getting a bunch of spam. I think every blog gets them though, regardless of no follow / do follow. I’m somewhere in the middle of the argument. I no no strong opinion either way.
Is you can see, the results of your no – no follow policy had payed of, almost 30 comments on one post.
That is success in my book.
I am making my blog do follow, thanks for the good article.
Great way to position the argument over do follow or no follow with your own test and revealing the findings. Thank you for your honest experience.
Trackbacks