Blog Azeroth

What are they? What do they mean? How does it affect us as bloggers?

I've found a smattering of resources around about it, but I still do not possess a clear understanding of it.

Huh?

It's mostly instructions for web spiders and tell the bots whether or not to follow certain links when counting the pages rank according to what links it gets. I'm not at home, else I could link a few resources google offers showing about how it ranks pages, but a large portion of the rank comes from how often and how the page is linked from other pages.

So when the nofollow attribute is on, spiders ignore the link when calculating rank. Usually, this applies to comments, so that when people put links to their blog in their comment, the spider doesn't think you wrote the link yourself. It makes sense in a way, but it obstructs free-link sharing by posting comments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

Dofollow is simply a plugin for Wordpress to remove the "nofollow" attribute from links on your Wordpress blog.

~Qz

Google doesn't really honour noindex and nofollow directives anyway.

They are essentially for search engines now. noindex mean that search engines should ignore this page. nofollow, means ignore the next page and any pages after it.

Gwaendar is right, they don't all pay attention and some crawl it anyway. If you want to stop them completely (almost) then add them to your robots file.

This is one way to stop others from spamming your comments with links to their own website, especially if you don't have a way to stop spam like with Akismet. If you do not add a noindex and nofollow attribute to the link that they post, then when they post a link on your site they are helping their own site in search engines.

This may or may not be a good thing, depending on if you like them.

It's still not completely clear to me how different spiders treat it either.

Basically, noindex tells the web crawler not to index that link as an outbound link on your site (and subsequently as an inbound link to the site it's pointint at). No follow tells them not to follow the link from your site.

It's a great way to combat spam comments, because before nofollow-noindex, blackhat SEO's would spam blogs in order to get an impressive number of inbound links for their site, bumping themselves in the search engines. Noindex cuts the linkjuice flowing through comment links, so it keeps the blog cleaner and more "on-topic-comment-friendly".

Hope this helps.

Actually, no. It's a great way for Google and the other search engines who use it (not all do, Yahoo for instance ignores it) to discard the issue about the relevance of the content provided in comments.

To combat spam comments, you use spam filters, captchas, authentication and user trust. No-follow and no-index are tools promoted by search engines to remove part of the headache about gauging the relevance of the content more susceptible to spamming.

Basically these directives are outsourcing the quality control question to the blogger, for no direct discernible gain by the blogger.

It's also, IMO, fundamentally contrary to the very spirit of blogging, that is, a large conversation by an ever-growing community.

On Altitis, I have put all comments by regular commenters back on follow, based on a specific threshold. My Akismet spam queue has increased for a while, until I added WP-Spamfree to the mix. Google is a tool, and a very useful one. But they don't get to redefine blogging to suit their own page rank problems. At least not on my blog.

Spam quota dropped when the no-follow rule was pinned down, so it was/is a great way to combat spam comments (although I agree it takes away the blogger's freedom).



Actually I'm afraid that's misleading. If Yahoo finds a nofollow link, it WILL follow it, but not transfer "algorithm juice" to the outbound site. According to Yahoo! Search, they do this simply for finding new content to index, but no actual algorithm changes occur.

So basically, if your site gets 10 inbound links, all of which have the nofollow attribute, your site won't move an inch in the Yahoo! SERPs.

Take into consideration that Yahoo and Google do not force you to use the no-follow attribute, it's a "link condom" that you have complete freedom upon. Use it or lose it at your own risk But seeing how dirty spamming has gotten on the Internet, it's like visiting the town whore without protection. You know it'll itch in the morning!

P.S. I loved your Jumping the Wath Gun post. Less enthusiasm offers a shorter drop from the saddle

was going to post here on my 2 cents but figured I might as well post on my site as it might have been a bit long winded...

http://www.isheepthings.com/blog/nofollow/

Normally a "follow" link is a vote for the site you're linking to. A "nofollow"
link basically is supposed to mean that you're not giving the linked site a vote.

The search engines will follow the nofollow links to find new info, it's just
that they won't add a vote to that site, so that site gets no boost in
search rankings.

If you go here: http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ you can grab
a widget for your Firefox browser that will let you see at a glance which
links are nofollow.

As far as links go... I have CommentLuv installed which will look at your
blog and try to grab the title, and link, of your last blog post and then
it'll append it to your comment.

KeywordLuv is similar, but puts a keyword lnk in the name field of your comment.

I have the DoFollow plugin installed, so comment links do get a bit of link juice.

But consider that if you leave good comments wherever you're commenting
then you'll get clicks on your link, so the follow part isn't so important.
Search ranking are lovely, but you can get a long of traffic from other
sources and nofollow doesn't mean a thing with those.

Greg

nofollow should be added to any link that anyone pays for on your site otherwise you run the risk of being penalized by google for selling link juice.

dofollow is just a movement where bloggers don't put nofollow on links

nofollow essentially makes a link worthless in search ranks and is only valuable if someone clicks on it. nofollow is sometimes called a link condom.

Well if that were the case you'd probably have a hard time getting people to pay for the link. The point is they want the "link juice". Shouldn't be too much of a problem though. It's rather hard for Google to determine if the "dofollow" link is paid for or not. Excessive use might draw attention though.

Google doesn't want people selling rankings. They want them based on content, not money. This is a long standing practice that Google finally cracked down on about a year ago. Many, many, many high profit blogs took a huge hit in the rankings department as a result and were forced to remove all payed links from their site otherwise they ran the risk of being blacklisted from Google entirely.

Now certainly there are numerous other ways to get traffic besides Google, but if you care about your Google traffic... fair warning they'll nail you if they ever get wind of it.