If the title of this post makes you go “huh?” – allow me to explain. This is something every blogger – law-related and otherwise – needs to be made aware of. What you do about it, of course, is up to you. In this post I’ll:
- Explain the debate as simply as I can
- Tell you what I did about it
- Ask for your opinions in the comments
What’s “NoFollow” All About? Not So Fast …
To properly explain the context of this debate, you first have to understand a bit about a blog’s infrastructure. Simply put, a blog is a website – though of course, it’s much more than that. Most blogs share the following characteristics:
- They’re updated frequently – often daily, sometimes more
- They feature posts with content relevant to the blog’s topic
- They allow the reader to talk back via comments
It’s this last feature that’s relevant for the “NoFollow” debate.
Comments and Trackbacks
When a reader wants to comment publicly on something she reads on another person’s blog, she has, essentially, two choices – she can either leave a comment, or she can post about it on her own blog. Comments usually show up right underneath the blog post in question, and that’s one way of carrying on the conversation. The other way – blogging about the post in question – takes place off the page, on someone else’s blog site. That leads to a problem for the bloggers involved – how does the commenting blogger let the first blogger know she’s written about him?
The answer is a trackback. Simply put, a trackback is a digital “shout out” to the first blogger, letting him know there’s a post that’s relevant to his post. It also lets Blogger #1 know where to find the comment, so he can carry on the conversation, if need be.
Trackbacks are great for a blogger for many reasons, but chief among them are: (1) they allow the blogger to keep up with the impact of his work and (2) they broaden the blogger’s potential reach by bringing in the second blog’s audience. They’re also good for the commenting blogger, though, and there’s the rub.
Trackbacks, Links, and SEO
When you allow trackbacks to your blog posts, you might get the option of manually approving them, or you may decide to allow all trackbacks regardless. Most bloggers like to maintain some control over trackbacks (after all, it could be coming from a plagiarist or an obscene site you’d rather not be associated with) and this is all fine and dandy. Most blog platforms will allow the blogger some control over which trackbacks are permitted and which aren’t.
Another effect of trackbacks is to improve SEO results. Search Engine Optimization is basically the process of making your site or blog as friendly as possible to search engines, in an effort to improve your ranking in results aimed at particular keywords that are relevant to your site or blog’s topic. (A full discussion of SEO is well beyond the scope of this blog, let alone this post. For more information, however, you can read this article at Wikipedia, or visit Aaron Wall’s SEO Book blog.) One of the many factors relevant to SERP (search engine result placement) is the number of incoming links a site has – how many other blogs and sites link back.
Lately, however, the SEO community has been debating the age-old quantity versus quality issue. In this context, the search engines value the kind of links you get, just as much as the number of links. In other words, if you have 10,000 incoming links from a link farm site that has nothing to do with your topic and isn’t very highly ranked itself, those results aren’t going to help your site’s SERP nearly as much as just a handful of links from very highly ranked blogs or sites.
Trackbacks, of course, are a form of incoming links. And as we saw, most blog platforms want to give the blogger some control over them. But WordPress goes a step farther – as do many platforms now – and that’s the issue.
Finally – What NoFollow Is All About
Inserted by default by WordPress into blogs based on that platform is a little bit of code:
rel="nofollow"
What does that mean? It’s a message to search engine bots to disregard the link for SERP purposes. So, there goes the theory that comments and trackbacks are good for SEO for blogs, right?
Not so fast. Enter DoFollow. This is another bit of code, in the form of a plug-in for WordPress, that reverses the tag. Now, that doesn’t mean the search engine will automatically value the link in a trackback or comment just as much as any other kind of link. It simply means that the search engine is no longer being instructed to ignore it.
Pros and Cons
Is this a good thing? The argument in favor of NoFollow is that trackback spam is wreaking havoc on honest search engine results that people use and depend on. The argument against it is that NoFollow does much more than fight spam – it fights blogs, too.
Where I Stand
Well – since I just installed DoFollow, I’ll let you all figure that out for yourselves. Where do you stand? That’s a question you have to answer for yourselves, obviously, but I’ll say this:
Blogging’s strength as a communication tool and as a marketing device rests primarily on its ability to create and encourage conversations. When something impedes that conversation – be it an avalanche of spam or NoFollow – the conversation participants suffer. It’s not my job as a blogger to control the conversation – only to participate in it. (Though, of course, just as in real life if someone barges in and makes inappropriate comments, I’m going to do something about it. In that sense, I do exercise some control, but solely to allow the real conversation to unfold naturally.)
So that’s it – NoFollow in a very brief nutshell. Where do you stand? Feel free to comment – no NoFollow here.
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