Say No To Nofollows!
In order to fight spam google invented the nofollow tag and then it was supported by others, which is supposed to tell the search engine spiders “not to follow the link”.
See here more about the nofollow failure:
- nofollow does not prevent comment spam
- nofollow is confusingly named
- nofollow harms the connections between web sites
- nofollow is not useful for humans, just for search engines using PageRank or a similar technique
- nofollow discriminates legitimate users as spammers
As good as their intentions were, this is definitely not serving the purpose, in fact it may have even trigger more trackback spam, since now spammers need more links to get the same value as they used to get with less links without nofollows and there’re much better things to fight blog spam, like askimet, which btw has already found a few spam comments on my blog…
So I think if people contribute to my blog by adding a comment they deserve a link, a real link without a nofollow!
And as you can see I’ve disabled nofollow on my comments 
Of course that doesn’t mean you can spam my blog or post some crap just to get a link. Please keep your comments related and positive 
Now if you’re wondering how to disable nofollow, all you need to do is download this plugin and install it.
Say no to nofollows!
Max said,
June 30, 2006 @ 10:19 pm
Great. In Germany a lot of blogs already deactivited nofollow
Manish Pandey said,
July 1, 2006 @ 8:50 am
Well thats really nice Michael… all the best!
Cristian Mezei said,
July 2, 2006 @ 1:47 am
I’m totally for nofollow Michael ..
Mike Dammann said,
July 3, 2006 @ 1:05 pm
I am against no follow in a perfect world, but it seems with so much clutter and spam, it does help make spamming less efficient. I think it’s a “whatever floats your boat” kinda deal. But if you know how to cut down on the bad entries and keep quality comments, I’d say don’t use no follow.
- Mike Dammann
Mike said,
July 3, 2006 @ 1:29 pm
Askimet seems to be working well so far and if not …
Dr. Mike’s Blog » Is nofollow worth it? said,
July 3, 2006 @ 5:44 pm
[...] I’m flipping through some of the posts about Google’s recent broken PR update (All of my new sites have PR0s still.) and came across this suggestion of removing the “rel=’nofollow’” bit from the comments. [...]
Jan Onesork said,
July 7, 2006 @ 10:41 am
I think nofollow is good for links in the comments -> It gives more ‘voting power’ to article links (links to pages we actually want to ‘vote’).
yfs1 said,
July 12, 2006 @ 11:22 am
nofollow is never good and I also ALWAYS disable it in my blogs. Google themsleves have said a lot of worrying things about it being a “labeling” system which seems to hint at a future use. Combine that with the fact that it doesn’t actually work for what it was intended for and you have the resons to NEVER use it.
Mark Hirst said,
July 24, 2006 @ 7:59 am
I run a gambling site and this means that even if i do have a valid comment to make i am usually removed? Is this fair? It seems that with the introduction of the no follow tag many other innocent webmasters are being treated as low life spammers. Well done for your stance I fully support you. Thanks
dsw said,
August 13, 2006 @ 8:14 pm
SE launched this feature to reduce blog spam, but I don’t see that spammers to stop, but still nofollow can be very useful in many cases.
Andy Beard said,
October 25, 2006 @ 3:16 pm
Nofollow is great, but not for what Google intended
It can be used on blogs to improve internal linking structure, just like the “revenge of the mininet”
You can easily increase the value of any page, including your homepage through smart internal linking.
This is something worth investing time in for your central site, and any related sites in your network.
Adriana Lima said,
January 10, 2007 @ 2:39 pm
I think yahoo still doesnt see nofollow tag. I have seen some backline in link: command generting from nofollow comments.
Mike said,
January 18, 2007 @ 10:30 am
Adriana Lima is commenting on my blog, that’s cool
WebStractions said,
May 8, 2007 @ 2:29 am
Umm Mike, I think that Adriana Lima post is spam partner. LOL.
Anyhow, I agree with you one-hundred and ten percent on this I have been regrettably away for the last couple of years, and came back to what can only be described as a fiasco.
medifast said,
May 26, 2007 @ 7:10 pm
agree i deactivate all nofollow in all my blog
My Tech World said,
November 19, 2007 @ 10:55 am
i just removed all ‘nofollow’ attribute in my comments. now we are a part of “dofollow” community
jessie said,
December 18, 2007 @ 6:50 pm
i also removed my NOFOLLOW attributes in my site although my plugin is a NOFOLLOW CASES BY CASE plugin. i still prefer to be able to filter links lefts behind my site although this is optional and administrative. i hope it will bring more traffic to my site