You Trackback, I Follow

If you’ve been working on link building for your site, you may have seen the terms “nofollow” and “dofollow”. In a nutshell: standard blogging platforms like WordPress automatically add the attribute rel=”nofollow” to links left by visitors in comments of trackbacks (automatic links to blogs that have cited yours).  If you’re new to this, it may be confusing, so I’ll break it down.

The reasoning behind this is that visitors could spam popular sites with comments just to get links back and improve their search engine rankings. Especially troublesome were people who would sign their comments with names that were obviously just Google keywords, such as “New Jersey air conditioning repair” or “Best mortgage rates”. Since most comment systems link the commenters name to their site, it was a cheap way for spammers to get some link juice for their sites. Usually the comments would be cut-and-paste jobs that added no value to the conversation (“Great job! Awesome post.”) and the culprits would leave them on hundreds of sites. The sole purpose was to gain backlinks, not to contribute anything.

And so the “nofollow” attribute was added as the default in blogging software. This attribute tells search engine spiders not to follow and index the link, thus removing the incentive to spam. And indeed it has worked. No incentive to spam = no spam. The free market does its job. Hooray!

However, some bloggers feel that if someone takes the time to contribute something of value, they deserve at least a “dofollow” link back. (Side note: technically there is no “dofollow” attribute. When you see references to “dofollow” or “yes-follow” links, it simply refers to the absence of the “nofollow” attribute).

The “dofollow” movement has been spreading around the blog world for a couple of years now. There are popular plug-ins which tell blogging software not to add the “nofollow” attribute to comments/trackbacks, and even search engines which specifically list only “dofollow” blogs. It’s all a great communal, open-source, happy joy-fest…except that the spammers are back. The cost of wanting to spread a little link love to your commenters? Loads of bogus comments to sift through and delete.

So what’s the middle way? Enter “dofollow trackbacks”. This plug-in for WordPress removes “nofollow” from trackbacks, but not from comments. Thus when someone cites your post in their blog, they receive a link back, but commenters still get “nofollow” links. There’s still no incentive to go around leaving worthless comments, but people who link to you automatically get something back.

I’m instituting it on this site as of now. It looks promising, but we’ll see how it goes, and I’ll report on the results at a later date. For now, count me with on the “You Trackback, I Follow” movement, and let the games begin.