So who removed nofollow from their comments ?

Lately, I am seeing a lot of blogs from the big boys (like Jeremy Zawodny or Jim Boykin) in our industry, without the nofollow on any of the links in the comments.

As far as I can see, Jeremy doesn’t allow links in the commenters name field, but any other links in the comments, are crawlable and countable links, like in this or this posts.

Moreover, Jim is apparently using some kind of module for this purpose, because I can see links without ANY nofollow in this post, with SOME nofollow’s in this post, and ONLY with nofollow in this post.

I mean you guys know, that I myself removed the nofollow from my comments some time ago (months). I just wanted to give something back to the community. Anyone can download the remove nofollow module I built (it’s very easy to install, just upload and activate) and can have the nofollow in the name/URL field without nofollow, but still keep the nofollow on any URL’s in the comment itself.

I mean these two guys (Jeremy is like Yahoo!’s MySQL geek and Jim is the CEO of Webuildpages, a well known Internet marketing company) certainly know what nofollow is, what can it do for them and stuff like that. If they have disabled the nofollow on their comments, that makes me (us) wonder right ?

I had some views on nofollow in the past. What’s your opinion ? Is the nofollow attribute really important anymore ? Is it preventing spam or not ?

Published by

Cristian Mezei

I am myself.

27 thoughts on “So who removed nofollow from their comments ?”

  1. Blog spam control can be done through many other methods. Keeping nofollow is just lame (note to self: use Cristian’s plugin to do that when not too lazy :) ).

    For blogs the rules are simple:
    – if spam delete
    – if valid comment, is rude not giving that visitor smthg back

  2. I agree as well. Nofollow should be removed from legit comments. There are so many spam blocking methods available now, this shouldn’t be an issue. Nofollow was only put in place because spammers were starting to attack blogs. Now that we can beat it, we should discontinue its use.

  5. Well Jim, I guess you are using Akismet right ? Akismet now catches 100% of spam for me. Really.

    I think that plugin of yours is just useless :) But I do love you that you love others back.

  6. I didn’t disable nofollow. It was never there in the first place.

    I have reasonable anti-spam stuff in place now (though some slips thru) and have a design in my head for a new one.

  10. Jer :

    (1) Done that myself a while ago.
    (2) If you say soooo.. As far as I know even much complicated captcha’s are easy to fool.
    (3) Mod_security – that’s mambo jumbo to me (not a programmer), but I’m glad it works for you.
    (4) Insights ? :P
    (5) Now that’s a nice thing and I noticed that. But what if you used it ? Anyone can put their “signature” anyway right ?

    Amit: Huh ? :)

  11. Nofollow or not, it’s a tricky question.

    I agree that people should get something back when they post a comment, etc. The problem is that without nofollow, a blog comment might be worth just as much SEO juice as as a link that has been carefully selected by the authors of a normal website.

    Still, nofollow is better than not giving anything back to the community. I have therefore installed the anti-nofollow on my blog.

  14. I was considering removing nofollow back in june and it was discussed on my blog http://www.jimwestergren.com/hard-words-from-john-scott/#comment-1699

    Most of the replies including from you Cristian :) advised me to leave nofollow on and frankly the only reason for me still having it on is because several of my articles have over 100 comments which will make me break google guidelines and it will almost waste the link juice coming to those articles.

    Anyway, that’s my 2 cents.

  16. I agree with Jim, no follow is not my friend. I find it’s better to deal with cleaning things up rather than not rewarding some good comments.

  19. The nofollow is a big nonsense. What is the problem in getting a crawlable link from a blog post? After all the idea of google or any search engine for tat matter should be to increase their freaking database size and index as many sites as possible and as quickly as possible at that.

    What is the point of indexing a site after five months of existance. All fresh content of the site is gone by then. Google might fight back stating tat it is fighting spam but again spam will be there for as long as the internet is there. Killing good sites (the innocent) for the bad site s is not such a good idea.

    What google can be on the other hand is stop this nofollow bullshit and rate sites based on the quality of content.

  20. I must say that the nofollow did improve many internet forms, however, I must say I do see some of my links with the nofollow on the google backlinks as well as yahoo,one of them are from http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ with have nofollows to all his comments.

    The Way I see it is simple.

    If the site you got the nofollow link is important, and the link is related to the content, you will get credited. However thats only by tought.

  21. I just increased your rating of this post =)
    p.s. I like the “spam me and i’ll spam you back 100x”… lol.. that should scare away spammers.

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