The Lawn Blog – NoFollow Free
The Lawn Blog is now a ‘NoFollow Free’ zone. This new implementation is being used to encourage comments to our articles. You can now feel free to post links promoting your website in your comments without google and other search engines thinking your links are spam and not giving you proper indexing.
So please post your comments with confidence.
For people who do not know what the ‘NoFollow’ tag is, here is some background info.
nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.
Concept and specification
The concept for the specification of the attribute value nofollow was designed by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen from Blogger.com in 2005.[1]
The specification for nofollow is copyrighted 2005-2007 by the authors and subject to a royalty free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C Patent Policy 20040205,[2] and IETF RFC 3667 & RFC 3668. The authors intend to submit this specification to a standards body with a liberal copyright/licensing policy such as the GMPG, IETF, and/or W3C.[1]
What nofollow is not for
The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content or preventing content to be indexed by search engines. The proper methods for blocking search engine spiders to access content on a website or for preventing them to include the content of a page in their index are the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) for blocking access and on-page Meta Elements that are designed to specify on an individual page level what a search engine spider should or should not do with the content of the crawled page.
Introduction and support
Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute[3] would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and Windows Live search engines also respect this tag.[4]
How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.”.
Interpretation by the individual search engines
While all engines that support the attribute exclude links that use the attribute from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary from search engine to search engine.[5][6]
* Google states that their engine takes “nofollow” literally and does not “follow” the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google’s index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).[6][7]
* Yahoo! “follows it”, but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
* MSN Search respects “nofollow” as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not MSN follows the link.
Note *** Information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
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January 5th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
It is amazing that you openly talk about and advertise your no follow free blog. I am just learning about the advantages, although other “Web experts” claim they still comment on no follow blogs. Thanks for the information.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Greetings Judy,
I still monitor the comments that come in. It is in my best interest to allow people to comment on my site and a lot of people will not bother to comment on a site with no follow tags in effect. One hand washes the other.
January 8th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
There is lots of speculation that Yahoo doesn’t really obey the nofollow tag. They list all of the nofollow links in site explorer. There is even one search engine I found that filters the nofollow results. http://www.followtopia.com. So maybe the nofollow tag will become even worse for websites.
January 9th, 2009 at 11:17 am
That pretty cool that you decided on making it no follow, though I’m not sure if you want to advertise that. I know that once people find this out you are gonna get a ton of comments. But most likely they are not gonna be comment you want. It’ll take a lot of time to read and moderate all those comments.
But i admire your courage, it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
I know that I am opening the door for spam coming in…but I still read through the comments and moderate them. I want people to be comfortable in leaving comments on my sites, and if you leave a legitimate comment about the post, I’ll approve it. But if a comment says ‘Great work….loved the article….etc’ they’ll get canned. Blogs are built for communication.
February 4th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
The “economic down turn” presents unusual opportunities I have one and have chosen to take it on. I have decided to go out on my own…tough decision to break away from the comfort zone!
As you know the construction industry has ‘tanked’ and of which I have worked in for over twenty years and never experienced a lay-off with lasting effects until now. I could always find another position with in those days, but not so now. In the Western States construction has slowed tremendously. Prior to the slow down I had a contact with a region turfgrass seed supplier. This supplier has been providing and developing new seed mixes since 1983 and has grown a successful company. I have been authorized to independently market ‘Eden® turfgrass seed mix, as an independent rep, and utilizing internet marketing. The product I represent is Eden® Turfgrass Seed. The Seed mix is an high quality fescuse and bluegrass, which brings together the unique characteristics of both types. The mix has the deep rooted element of fescue and the spreading roots of bluegrass. The deep roots provide resistances to drought and a firm hold for durability. The blue grass provides self mending, disease resistance with that beautiful dark green color. Eden® also has slower growth meaning less mowing and less impact on the environment and as well as less impact on water resource during times of drought. There are many seed types and mixes on the market, but I stand behind my product as well as the experience and longevity of the company. I hope, I was able to give you some insight about me, my need to build a network and the remarkable characteristic of my product. Once again thank you for your time and consideration. Visit bestgrassseed.com and pass along your thoughts or to a network member you know that would have interest in Eden®.