My Name is PotPieGirl and I FOLLOW

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!

25 Comments

  1. Thanks for making your blog do follow. I think that do follow is good for blogging. If someone takes the time to write a comment on a blog, provided that comment adds to the conversation, you should reward the commenter with a link. So, I thank you Pot Pie Girl.

    -Fred

  2. But when you leave more than one comment with two different links, that might be spammy 🙂 Oh well, I hope you have a sense of humor potpiegirl!!

    I love your blog by the way.

  3. PotPieGirl says:

    { PotPieGirl }

    LMAO! Yes, I DO have a sense of humor =) Just to humor YOU, I approved them both…lol

    Thanks for reading – please come back =)

  4. Yay! Thanks for enable the do follow. I also have do follow blog (Cutie Gadget) but I reallh hate when someone comment to my blog using the keyword in the name field. You may need also to be strict when approve it, especially if you have huge amount of comments.

    Welcome to dofollow Club 🙂

  5. PotPieGirl says:

    { PotPieGirl }

    Thanks, Cowy! I feel like such a dumba$$ having nofollow on my comments since I moved to WordPress back in January. Oh well, live and learn!

    You’ve got a great site over there at CutieGadget.com. I love the rainbow maker!

    Thanks for reading AND for adding to the conversation!

    Jennifer

  6. Yep, that was me, Chris Lang, PotPieGirl was talking about since I called most of what she links to junk (MyBlogLog especially). I went to look back at the plugins post that I commented on the other day but I don’t see it?

    First off, let me explain myself a little here, as I don’t believe I said nofollow was realted to PR in my prior post. I don’t care about PR, but I do care about where my Google link juice is going.

    PageRank is useless obsessive junk. StomperNet came out and finally said it right, “PageRank means nothing to the ranking of your site, it is an indicator of how often your site is re-indexed in Google.” Brad and Andy, sorry if it is a word or two off but I don’t have time to watch the video again. Fresh full index updates are extremely important to your linking strategies, so it does have big value, just not directly to your SERPs rankings.

    PR is also 2 to 3 months behind what Google currently PageRanks you as. A PR update is an update to what is displayed in the Google toolbar, not Google’s working PR number. You can currently be a 0 to Google and it will show you as a 3 if that is what the last update set you as and visa versa. A PR4 site displayed as 0. KeyWebData.com got PR delisted and was greyed out for 6 months, now I am a 3. Never did I see any variation in my listings other that the usual Google bounce.

    What I said in my prior comment was that “you only have so much Google link juice to give away.” Google in a simple analogy does this: Value of site divided by the total number of links, in site and outgoing. Each link gets so much juice to pass on. This could be over simplification but this is what I believe from reading Andy Beard and seomoz.org.

    So if you have X amount of link juice to pass on to links why would you give this finite virtuall resource away indiscriminately? Why if you have only so much measure of importance for links to pass on would you not reserve it for just the best ones? And your own in site links?

    Here’s why:

    The same link juice you pass on to other sites also is given to links within your site. Let’s see, do I want to diminish link juice to my links to my own content by not using nofollow in the link to the Golf Simulator Bar?

    Do I want to squander my link juice by using a social site plugin that creates links to 15 social bookmarking sites on every post? I have 85 blog posts on KeyWebData.com. If every post has 15 social bookmarking links then I have increased my outgoing links by 1275 outgoing links. WOW! If I even had that many in site links I would have decreased their importance by 50%.

    Let’s add in your blogroll, MyBlogLog, site admin links and so forth. I will round it off to 20 links that you don’t need top share with. They appear on every page of your blog. Let’s say you have 200 pages, so doing the math you have 4,000 outgoing links that mean NOTHING! 4,000!

    You have now diminished your Google link juice 500%! Now that you use dofollow in your comments it has little meaning because you have diluted your link’s relvance with links to MyBlogLog profiles.

    What is more important, your readers comments of random MyBlogLog profiles?

    Google judges blogs by the company they keep. The sites you link to, the prior blog posts of your own that you link to and repetitive links, like in your navigation bars.

    Linking to prior blog post’s shows a “content theme” or theme layering or theme linking to Google. If a blog post is seen by Google thru keywords to be about widgets and you link to three prior blog posts of you own about widgets and then to other authority sites about widgets then Google will rank you better under widgets.

    So if you are going to use this strategy to create a theme within your site, why not reserve that link juice for your own links?

    I totally disagree with you that “Because of the use of nofollow, the original and natural flow of the web is altered. It’s NOT natural.” Backlinks meant nothing to the ranking of websites until Google made it a natural part of search engine rankings. Google still follows the link, it just does not pass on your relevance to the link.

    The natural flow of the web is hyperlinks, nofollow does not interrupt this, it just allows you to determine which links in your site mean something and which ones are just administration and advertising.

    I also believe that Google tries out blog posts in in Blogsearch first and then how they do there their ranking in Websearch is somewhat determined, but nobody agrees with me. With that in mind, my final point is this: Remove your MyBlogLog junk, put nofollow in all your admin links and advertising, delete your blogroll and for a month see what happens.

    PotPieGirl, I know you have all the links to the SEO tracking apps I use because you bought my book, why not take some sceen shots now, and then on July first screen shot the sale terms and see if you went up?

    I already did on my site and I know for sure what works.

    This is a reprint of my own blog post, you can comment on it there or here, I will read them both. If you want to tell me I’m a jackass, do so on my blog. PotPieGirl is a nice positive person and her blog should stay that way too.

    Chris Langs last blog post..Google PageRank and Your Google Juice

  7. Hey PotPieGirl,
    I have the do follow plug in installed on my Internet Marketing for Mommies site, however, when I get a comment that I have to approve it shows as no follow in the html within the comment. Does that change automagically or is there something wrong going on?

    Great to see you join the Do Follow! woo hoo.

    Jackie

    Internet Marketing Moms last blog post..Link Building ~ I’m finally starting to get it.

  8. Hey, I really enjoyed reading what you had to say. You have lots of good ideas. You can tell that one to your husband.

  9. Chris is wrong – the MyBlogLog widget does not bleed “Link Juice” because it’s Javscript, and Google does not see any of the links to profiles. Many of the other widgets are also Javscript, and so will not bleed link juice either.

    I also believe that internal links are treated seperately from outgoing links. Oh, and outgoing links do not affect your PR – PageRank Leakage is a myth!

  12. I just switched from an old blogger blog to wordpress 2 days ago and wasn’t aware of the default nofollow. Thanks for the heads up.

    I couldn’t agree more with you about the value of DoFollow … it’s a great way to be kind to your visitors.
    I’ve officially joined the DoFollow gang.

    Todd Alans last blog post..Eben Pagan’s Amazing Guru Mastermind Videos

  13. I just love following your posts. I just recently pulled your RSS and I’m glad I did. Your wit and wisdom are going a long way toward pushing me forward on some things that I really have been thinking about for, literally, years.

    And I like your new spam policy, I really did LOL at that one, and that doesn’t happen often!

    Arics last blog post..One for my idea book

  14. I love the I follow concept, and I am looking into getting all my blogs to be “I-follow”. I have had a little trouble figuring out how to do it, but I think it’s worth the effort. I will get it done though! But, ~Props To You~ for taking a stand 🙂

    Ashleys last blog post..Getting Everything Setup

  15. Actually, controlling PR is only one aspect of nofollow. What is more interesting is intention — why one wanted to control it in the first place.

    Remember that Google team went from door to door of some of the largest websites in the world to persuade them to use nofollow.

    Search engine is THE tool for discovering new sites. There is also social bookmarking, blogging, word of mouth emailing, and other ways, but search engines are by far the primary tool when you look for something you don’t know much about.

    By possessively preserving PR on the big sites which than get even bigger, searches return more and more links from those sites. That is indirectly a way to control access to information. We are more and more being served with information from few large sources.

    However, that in itself would not be a problem if nofollow was a standard attribute. As it is not, most website owners webmasters don’t know about it, and are therefore not reciprocating big sites with the same favor. BUT, this will change with the new HTML standard that also has nofollow attribute, and people will finally learn about it in the same way they learn about target or title attributes.

    When that happens, than this nowollow monstrosity (http://seolutions.net/blog/nofollow-monstrosity/) will be less so.

    lazars last blog post..The Next Evolution of Social Media…

  16. Wow, I’m so glad that you’re bearing the [U Comment, I Follow] badge. I also attached one on my blog. Truly, erasing the rel=”no follow” on our blog’s codes are cool. I believe it’s an act of unselfishness. Don’t you also think that way??

  17. But this will get you a lot of spam. I don’t follow

  18. I’m still in doubt about the ‘nofollow’ tag. But it’s good to hear that you’re passionate about!

    Richards last blog post..Week 9 of C25K

  19. Cool, I think I’m gonna turn on link lurve to my website 😀

  20. Dofollow blog get some spam comment but gives lot of traffic for our blog.

  21. Hi,
    We should always prefer the do follow blogs for blog commenting.Although some comments are gone to spam but very useful to increase traffic on blogs.
    Thanks.

  22. Hi,
    Hey, I really enjoyed reading what you had to say.
    You have lots of good ideas.
    This is really great stuff.Keep going.
    Thanks for sharing.

  23. Hi,
    Thanks for sharing information about this controversial topic NoFollow , Do follow and I think that do follow is good for blogging.

  24. Finding dofollow blogs is really very tough. Thanks for being a dofollow blog.But there must a lot of comments that you need to check everyday.

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