nofollow should be an option

  • suedkind

    (@suedkind)


    19 years, 3 months ago

    Dear developers,

    I would like to know your thoughts on this issue.

    I read in some posts, that the nofollow-attribute has been added to the most current nightly. I haven’t installed this version yet, so I have to rely on this information.
    The messages I read said that it seems to be hard coded in the source and it is no option the user can activate or deactivate within the admin interface.

    Since there is a big discussion whether this attribute is helpfull or not and who it might help, I wonder if it is possible to make it an option.
    In this case everybody could decide for himself if he wants to use the attribute or not.

Viewing 3 replies - 16 through 18 (of 18 total)
1 2
  • jinsan

    (@jinsan)

    19 years, 1 month ago

    Thanks for the link to the plugin, the more I read about it, the less it seems to be of use to actual bloggers and more to the search engine companies – after all it prevents spam from ranking higher, but it doesn’t actually do anything for the site in question. Bots will be indiscriminate of their spam, so what benefit does no-follow offer? Perhaps I need a clearer understanding of it, but it seems to penalise legitimate links, which can only be a bad thing. If you configured, working spam protection, then do you really need no follow?

    angsuman

    (@angsuman)

    19 years, 1 month ago

    I fully agree with you. nofollow is of benefit to Google and other search engines. It doesn’t benefit the bloggers. I want to provide commenters on my blog some link-love back to their own blog. This is how the web works – we share, we help each other. And it also helps adding rank to relevant sites.
    My bones with nofollow is that it penalizes legitimate links along with the illegitimate ones as you pointed out.
    I make sure my blog is spam free, install plugins as required, monitor the blog. So I would never go for nofollow. Nor should anyone who actively blogs and takes steps to prevent comment spam.
    As you correctly pointed out comment-spamming is done in bulk. They don’t care if your blog is nofollow compliant or not. Either way they will spam you. As someone pointed out before there are spammers who just want people to click on their site. They don’t care much about google ranking. If 1000 people visit your site everyday chances are some will be in such a state of mind as to click on such spam and get their fill of p*n or v*a or whatever it is advertised. And that will happen irrespective of nofollow.

    I strongly think nofollow should be an option. Until then this plugin does exactly that in the simplest way possible.

    bens

    (@bens)

    19 years, 1 month ago

    I think nofollow makes sense. Comment spammers really do appear to be doing this solely for pagerank, so if all blogs implemented nofollow they would stop. Remember, posting spam costs them bandwidth, so they aren’t as indiscriminate as you think.

    I would be interested in having nofollow-addition be determined by user-level. Any authenticated user with level >0 should be able to post crawlable links.

    Remember, a functioning search-engine system benefits everyone.

Viewing 3 replies - 16 through 18 (of 18 total)
1 2
  • The topic ‘nofollow should be an option’ is closed to new replies.