My Name is PotPieGirl and I FOLLOW

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No follow, do follow, I follow, no nofollow….. you follow? Is anyone else annoyed at this whole nofollow craze? For those that are regular readers here at PotPieGirl.com, you know I tend to jump up on my soapbox now and then. Forgive me, but I’m about to do it again right now =)

Let’s Talk About NoFollow

Originally, the nofollow attribute was designed to curb comment spam. Basically what it all means is that if someone commented on your blog and dumped a link, or a bunch of links, your nofollow attribute would tell the search engines not to follow it or to give ranking power to it.

Simply put, don’t follow this link out of my blog, and don’t have my blog cast a vote for the page that the link links to.

(For blogs that are not moderated, that is a great idea IF you leave your comment area wide open for anyone and everyone.)

Then we move forward in time to the whole nofollow for paid links thing. Google pretty much wants bloggers to ‘disclose’ links that are paid for by adding the nofollow attribute to them. To me, that is like announcing, “Hey Google, I took money to put this link here! But hey, I like the money and all, but don’t pass any of my link juice to it!”

Now move forward a bit more in time to now…. folks are all proclaiming the magic of “sculpting Page Rank” with the nofollow attribute. While I could go off on a whole other tangent regarding the Page Rank sculpting concept, I will just say this…. Wasn’t nofollow designed to control the way Page Rank flows from one site to another site? Now, it is for controlling Page Rank within one site?

Now, because of the use of nofollow, the original and natural flow of the web is altered. It’s NOT natural.

Many folks think, and agree, that the Page Rank flow within a site SHOULD be manipulated. That ‘irrelevant’ pages on a blog shouldn’t get Page Rank juice from the site. Pages like categories, and the About page, or contact info.

Tell me, please… WHY are these pages NOT relevant to a site? If you have pages that are so IRrelevant to your site, and you don’t want them indexed – then why not use a robots exclusion in a robots.txt file?

Here’s my opinion… If I link to something on this blog… be it my categories, archives, a service I use, or links relevant to a post I make, it IS relevant to me, PotPieGirl.com, or to the conversation.

And that is, in my oh so humble opinion, what a blog IS… it is a CONVERSATION. I want everything that is in my conversations to be indexed and crawled and added to the great big tangled web of conversations that we call the internet.

Do I have so-called Page Rank Leaks on this blog? I’m sure I do. So what? Really… SO WHAT? Could I offer folks more Page Rank juice from within a post link if I controlled the other Page Rank flow here on my blog? I’m sure I could.

But WHY?

I’m SO Pretty!

No, I’m not being vain with that comment – it’s a family/friends joke for those that hang around me. You see, I tend to say dumb things. The kind of things that come out your mouth without ever passing through your brain. I do that… a good bit (bless my heart). Whenever I do this, my dear husband just pats me on the head and says, “You’re so pretty!” I guess he says that to try and take the sting out of me also being a dumba$$ – haha!

So today, I am really thinking about this whole nofollow thing… when I realize that I’ve never checked THIS blog for nofollow in the comment area that is automatically added to all WordPress blogs.

Yup, you guessed it… all this time I have had nofollow in my comment area!

I’m so pretty!

So, as of today, May 24, 2008 –

PotPieGirl.com is officially a no nofollow for comments!

Just a few disclaimers on this –

  • If you put a HTML link within a comment, it will be held in moderation until I approve it.
  • If you spam my blog, I will haunt you, hunt you down, and make fun of your clothes, your hairstyle, AND your car.
  • I reserve the right to edit, moderate, remove, or delete any comment I feel necessary. (hey, it is MY blog afterall… haha!)

Here’s the thing…. If I talk about you, I pass link love. If you talk back to me, you get link love. If you talk ABOUT me on your blog and link to a post here, you get link love.

AND now (thanks to the commentluv plug in), you will also get your last blog post shown on your comment here if you linked your comment to your blog. I want PotPieGirl.com to do its part to completely tangle up the web!

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