November 27, 2007

I use the do-follow plugin. It seems to me that to decide that comments shouldn’t get any link love is a rather odd decision. It is a little like reducing the freedom of millions in order to prevent the odd terrorist here or there, i.e. it disproportionately tars everyone with the same brush.

There are a few reasons why I don’t like the no-follow attribute.

Firstly, I take the view that if someone contributes towards a subject then they deserve recognition for that contrbution.

There aren’t too many ways that recognition can occur. The link to the site is there for readers to go to if they find the comment interesting. No-following removes the other method of recognition. After all if someone has played a part in the community then their own writing should be more relevent as a result shouldn’t it?

As the search engines are the only real way in which relevence is judged then, by necessity, the comment needs to produce some link love.

Secondly, I think the existence of no-follow just serves to highlight the absense of it in other circumstances.

Easy WordPress has a post about finding blogs that are no-followed in order to concentrate comments on those blogs that don’t employ no-follow.

This seems a tad mercenary to me, surely you either have something to say or you don’t; although, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to decide not to contribute to something where your contribution isn’t given the recognition it deserves.

I’d love to see no-follow removed from WordPress, but I wonder whether there is an intermediate step. A method of voting on comments where those below average get no love.

What do you think? Do you care about no follow when you coment on other blogs, do you have any feelings one way or another about using it on your blog? let me know.

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