Do unto others as you would have others do unto you!(very important)
For more information in the “nofollow” movement and about this text look at the authors article, I decided to post a small portion of the article here because I strongly believe in this, the rel=”nofollow” is something that really affects us all in terms of generating traffic and visibility to your website, if you let the “Big Guys” run the shot’s soon the web will have no “convetional” place for individuals in search engines. Let’s not allow this to happen, please read bellow and read more at the author’s site, here.
The “Big Dog’s” are crushing small websites SERPS with theyre “nofollow” policy, most major web-sites receive a lot of page rank from small regular sites and blogs, but they don’t give any away, they use by default the ‘rel=”nofollow” attribute in external links. These actions are capitalizing a concentration of PageRank on the internet, equivalent only to capital in the “real” world.
nofollow movement
Explanation of the image:
Left: Good old web. Middle: Big sites nofollow small ones. Right: Small sites reciprocate.
Note that not only sites that are nofollowed (blue links) lose pagerank which is roughly represented with the size of the circle, but also other sites that are linked to from these (green links). For example, note that even though Page 1 didn’t have any link from the big site 3, it did have a link from a smaller site 2 which was affected with the nofollow policy. Effectevely, the whole web is affected, including your site.
By using nofollow, these sites do not trust external links nor users that post those links. This means that these sites don’t give any credit (in the form of PageRank) to those links and are essentially considering them spam (as that was ‘officially’ the purpose of ‘nofollow’ tag introduction). This results in their pages appearing higher in search engine results and your pages appearing lower.
Another serious problem with nofollow is that it is a non standard HTML attribute value. This means that most webmasters are not aware of it, and therefore are not applying it. This means that there is no nofollow reciprocity as it is not implemented equally throughout the web. Luckily, this will change with HTML 5, when nofollow will become a part of the standard, and people will learn about it the same way they learn about other HTML elements.
<a href="http://www.example.com/">link</a>
<a href="http://www.example.com/" target="_blank">link with standard attribute</a>
<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">link with non-standard attribute value</a>
Probably every webmaster knows how to place a standard target attribute on a link. This is becuse about every single tutorial on the internet talks about it.
So what to do now?
There are few “dofollow movements” on the internet where people suggest eliminating nofollow from blog comments (this is o.k. and I suport it, I do follow on my blog’s comments but please don’t spam or I’ll delete your comment if it has no porpuse), apart from that, and, if we want to bring back the balance to the PageRank distribution (and therefore to the access to a more diverse information in search engine results), than we have to apply ‘nofollow’ towards large websites that use the same.
PageRank will remain a significant factor in search engine results for a while, as it proved to be a very successful tool in providing relevant results.
However, pagerank distortion leads to distorted results, what is your personal satisfaction with finding things on Google in the last three years ? Exactly !
WordPress Blog SEO Plugin adds Nofollow tag to Links to Wikipedia, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Delicious…
Some of these sites, in addition to not giving you any credit, also DEVASTATE your site PageRank and SERP position with this nofollow monstrosity.
The purpose of Nofollow-Reciprocity is to ‘redistribute’ PageRank to small site owners. This plugin detects links to above mentioned sites, and puts ‘nofollow’ tags on them. ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’
WordPress is a major blogging platform, with tens of millions of users. If many people using WordPress use this plugin, other big sites may reconsider their ‘nofollow’ strategy.
This plugin expands on Wikipedia nofollow plugin hacked by a revolted blogger.
You can easily add your own ‘black list’ sites in the code of the downloaded file. Note that there may be good sites on the list as I did not look at all those websites. However, almost all of the most visited sites that I looked at started using nofollow.
DOWNLOAD AND INSTALLATION
Download nofollow-reciprocity.zip from WordPress nofollow plugin page. You can also read more about it there.
- Unzip into your
/wp-content/plugins/directory. - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
- Remember to delete WP-Cache if you have that plugin. Otherwise, you may not see effect of this plugin immediately.
- That’s it! Now you can watch your blog statistics, it will bring you more traffic.
