Bad Practice: nofollow Editorially Reviewed Links
Written by David Peralty in
3 Comments
Joost, and no, not the new media thing, has put up a post on using nofollow in your content. He talks about how he, as a WordPress plugin author feels a little annoyed to see a link back to his plugin being nofollowed and understandably so.
Imagine you’re like me, and you like WordPress so much that you write plugins for it. People start writing about these plugins and they, of course, link to you. You see these pages writing about you show up in your referrer stats and of course you go and have a look at what they’re writing about your plugins. Imagine my surprise when I see the links in the post being nofollowed… These links have been editorially reviewed, why would anyone want to nofollow those?
The issue really comes back to giving people what they deserve. Joost worked hard to create a plugin, and by nofollowing the link, the person writing about the plugin is basically saying that his work is note even worth a bit of page rank juice from Google. The upswing is that after he wrote the article, the person that had made the mistake of nofollowing the link, has since dropped the tag.
Read the full story on Joost de Valk’s blog.
Might I also suggest bloggers also use one of the dofollow plugins (there are two good ones available for WordPress). By default, links in comment are marked as no follow as well. If a blogger is going to stop by and comment on your work, pay them back by allowing their link to their page to be followed.
Glad to see you agree David.
@MacShout: I use dofollow as well, though I fade out nofollow after two days to give me some time to remove spam.
Great article. Nice blog. Keep it coming. Mike