Giving visitors link juice

written on May 16, 2008 in Blogging, Tips & Tricks

Just last week I wrote a post on adding nofollow to all outgoing links, or at the very least, paid links. However, I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t find it fair to people who comment on my site. Hence I’ve added a plugin that removes nofollow from people who’ve commented more than 5 times, as WordPress annoyingly incorporates nofollow in all comment links. It’s supposed to prevent spammers and sploggers, but in all honesty, Akismet does more than a good job doing that for me.

So what is nofollow? This is your regular link in html:
<a href="http://www.riyuu.org">Ever After</a>
Now if you added nofollow, the link will now look like this:
<a href="http://www.riyuu.org" rel="nofollow">Ever After</a>

By adding nofollow to your links, you’re telling the search engine spiders not to index the pages you linked to, hence the pagerank of the sites you linked to don’t increase. The name nofollow is misleading because the search engine spiders do follow/crawl the said link, it just doesn’t index them. Wikipedia has a nice chart showing how each search engine interprets nofollow. Dofollow, on the other hand, isn’t an attribute. Rather, it’s simply the absence of the nofollow attribute. Those “normal” links will be crawled and indexed by the search engines and affect one’s pagerank.

Speaking of pagerank, the pagerank for this site is now back to its original PR2, while Riyuu.org went from PR2 to PR3. I found the latter to be surprising because I haven’t updated the site in the longest time. Must be the fanlistings bringing in links

Like I mentioned earlier, WordPress will automatically insert a nofollow attribute to all links in the comments of your blogs. As a matter of fact, it’s been doing so since version 1.5. So if you want to reward those commenting on your blogs loyally, there are many WordPress plugins that will remove nofollow from links. Give your visitors some link juice and remove nofollow Error processing request