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It really irks me to see organisations like the IIA (the Irish Internet Association) knowingly setting all links in comments on its blog to be “nofollow.
The “nofollow” attribute sucks. Sure, there are *some* circumstances where it can be useful eg. linking to a competitor for example, but if you moderate comments on a blog then nofollow is just inane and dumb.
This blog quite happily “follows” people who take the time to share their opinion via a comment. In fact all the blogs I run or post to use the normal link attributes.
So what the hell is up with the IIA?
They’re supposed to be promoting the internet sector in Ireland etc., etc.,
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From le craic:
Does seem a bit odd alright. Maybe an oversight – if it’s not an oversight then it’s bad form.
Just as a side note. I had a blog post a while back that linked to this post on your blog
http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2008/07/30/cool-tshirt-makes-me-want-to-have-children-sort-of/
my link didn’t appear in the comments. is this a typepad / wordpress thing where pingbacks/trackbacks aren’t published or is a policy you have?
From Michele Neylon:
le Craic – it’s not an oversight. I already asked them about it and got a really silly reply.
As for the links from your blog to mine. If you use trackback it will probably appear, but the pingback thing is WP specific and will not work with anything else. Unfortunately both pingback and trackback are open to abuse, so I rarely find any legitimate ones in the queue. I think I’ve disabled it on a couple of sites, as it was just a total waste of time moderating it
Regards
Michele
From le craic:
You should get more of your fellow IIA members to press for a change on it – they have to listen to members – you’re paying their wages.
re: pingback/trackback – I’ve always got confused with those!
From Lar:
Nofollow is a default with wordpress – I assume it’s there so as not to encourage comment spam.
In the office, we’re of the same mind, if you contribute you should get the Google Juice.
We found a plugin for WordPress “Dofollow” that gets rid of the attribute:
From Roseanne:
Hi Michele,
Roseanne here from the IIA. Thanks for reminding me about this issue which you did indeed raise *just* before I went on holidays. It is now fixed and no, the IIA is not afraid to follow but now a little bit afraid to go on holidays ever again…
Have a great weekend!
Roseanne
From Michele Neylon:
@Lar – From what I recall WP turns it on by default, but there are several ways of getting it to behave. MT comes with the option to turn it on or off builtin.
@Roseanne – glad to hear it
From Leon Quinn:
Its not easy to remove the default nofollow from a wordpress installation unless you can edit code or find a plugin as above.
Nice to see things change for the better when someone moans too!!
From frankp:
Hey Michele, I don’t agree with your view at all.
Here’s a post I wrote on nofollow/dofollow a while back.
From Michele Neylon:
Frank
You are entitled to your opinion, but I think it is flawed.
Michele
From frankp:
That’s certainly a possibility I’m open to, but where is the flaw in my logic, in your opinion, when it comes to linking strategies and control over inbound/outbound links and how Google views them?
From Leon Quinn:
Well I think in the case of the IIA, they probably shouldn’t have the nofollow link but for other sites as frankp says, there are SEO implications involving Page Rank leak etc..so you have to be careful about the amount of external links you have on a page/site.
I’ve also talked about nofollow here – http://www.reverbstudios.ie/blog/important-info-on-wordpress-comment-links/