Is not "nofollow" a boon or a bane ? | Blogging

By ZigfredDiaz
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From time to time, I do some blog hopping and if I find some good blogs, I try to emulate what they are doing to increase my income money from blogging . I have noticed the "U Comment I follow" sign but I never knew what that meant until lately I discovered its importance.

The "U Comment I follow" sign basically means if you place a comment in a certain blog which has that sign, the search engines will follow the author's links, or the links placed on the comment itself. Eventually, this will result in the "commenter" getting a back link.

Some search engines (like google) say they do not follow the links in the comments. However a test done has revealed otherwise. Others (like yahoo, msn etc.) say they treat the links as if it is any other link. But no matter what, disabling the "No follow" will both be of mutual benefit to the blogger and the visitors of the site.

So what really does "nofollow" mean ? Google orchestrated this scheme. They observed that spammers are putting up spam comments in a lot of blogs in the hope of getting a lot of back links. (Note that back links help boost ranking in the search engines) To remedy this situation and to aend spamming, Google enforced a "no follow" policy when it comes to comments. This was then followed by other search engines.

The question is, did they succeed ? Today the spamming problem has gotten worse and spammers still spam. According to Word Press founder Matt Mullenweg "In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don't think nofollow had much of an effect, though I'm still glad we tried it."

So why should you continue to allow "no-follow" after all, it has no effect after. (This is enabled by default) You are better off protecting your blog by activating spam filters. The adverse effect of "no-follow" is that it punishes the commentor with legitimate and sensible comments. As one blogger puts it so nicely, "PUNISH SPAMMERS, NOT BLOGGERS."

About the Author

Interested to learn more about nofollow, make money online, money blogging and other interesting topics ? Visit the blog of Zigfred Diaz where he regularly writes about these topics including other interesting topics such as money saving tips and investments.

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