What is The yesfollow Project?
The yesfollow Project was created to give bloggers, commenters and forum participants the credit they deserve. The blogosphere provides some of the most useful content on the web, but due to the pervasive use of the “nofollow” attribute, most blogosphere contributors don’t get search engine credit for their comments and discussions. The yesfollow Project aims to change that.
But what the heck is the “nofollow” attribute?
The “nofollow” was supposedly created to fight comment spam in blogs. It is an attribute added to a link (as in “rel=nofollow“) which tells search engines not to follow a link when crawling and indexing websites. This means the page the link points to gets no “credit” for the link. (The kind of credit which, for example, would lead to higher PageRank and search rankings in Google’s algorithm)
And that is a problem because?
There is nothing wrong with the “nofollow” attribute in and of itself. The problem arises when you realize that all major blogging platforms implement the “nofollow” attribute by default in all the links associated with comments.
If you read and moderate your blog’s comments, then there are no useless comments or spam in there for the search engines to worry about. This means that your prime readership, those that read your blog and take the time to leave thoughtful comments, are the ones being hurt. They are the ones not getting search engine credit for their attention and contribution.
Ooooooh, now I get it. But what can I do?
Disable “rel=nofollow” on your blog. You can install a plugin which removes the “nofollow” tag from your blog, or disable the plugin which adds it. For Wordpress 1.5+, install the DoFollow plugin. For Movable Type, disable the nofollow plugin. If you run another platform and know how to disable the “nofollow” attribute on it, please leave a comment on the How-to page.
Then, contact your blog software developer and tell them that the “rel=nofollow” attribute on blog comments is hurting the blogosphere and not stopping comment spam, so we’d be better off without it.
Unfortunately, if you’re on a hosted blogging platform such as Blogger, LiveJournal, or MSN Spaces there’s nothing you can do but switch to another platform. But hey, I recommend that anyway.
What’s in it for me?
Good karma. More comments. A cool button. Happier commenters. A better blogosphere. A link from this site.
