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Who Killed Conversations?

Started by Barry Welford · 10 months ago

Google’s NoFollow Dictum Has Played Its Part

Long, long ago in 2003, Miles Burke was mourning the Lost Art of Conversation and wondering how it could be encouraged. Since then things have gone from bad to worse. Online forums, the natural home for conversations, seem to ... Continue reading »

7 comments

  • Dave

    1 year ago

    Hiya Barry.... nice stuff and tnx for the luv - nothing I like more than a link text with 'rant' in it...lol... gotta love it!

    I certainly am never afraid to nuke a comment that smells of a dive by link drop that's for sure - BUT I also won't nofollow them... to be honest I only use them when linking out to a potential 'bad nieghbourhood'.

    I don't sell links, thus I feel that is the ONLY use I need it for. I thought that was what it is for? Not to 'play it safe'? If legitimate webmasters start to use it... then there will actually be more networked linkspam links out there in comparison to legitimate links since the good peeps are afraid to show ANY link love.... it could be troubling.

    Google may have started it, but who perpetuates it? We do.... sigh....

    oh well... back to work tnx for the post and mention - U forgot to mention that I didn't in ANY WAY pay you for it.... bwaa ha ha ha ha
    reply
  • Mark

    1 year ago

    Hi, I'm the author of DigeratiMarketing. While I think it's ironic that there's only 1 comment here, I just wanted to point out a few things that have been overlooked..

    For instance, "...won’t nofollow them… to be honest I only use them when linking out to a potential ‘bad nieghbourhood’. "

    How do you know when you're linking to a bad neighbourhood then? Do you change you user-agent or referrer when checking the page that's being linked to? Do you inspect the information in the header? If not, then it would be quite simple for me to dupe you into linking anywhere I wished.

    Just nofollow your comments and be safe, there are thousands of blogs with nofollow with great followings. Tbh, all user-generated content should be nofollowed.
    reply
  • Barry Welford

    1 year ago

    Mark, thanks for presenting the counter-argument. In some ways it's ironic that you would have that view-point while producing the list that you do. Clearly your approach is the easy way out. However I'm always upset when the actions of a few can spoil the way things work for the many.
    reply
  • Rob

    1 year ago

    Good to hear. I'm very sick of nofollow. As far as I am concerned, nofollow is a giant carpet Google threw over its mess. When I say mess, I mean PR. They should have never publicly displayed the crutch to their algo.
    reply
  • Craig

    12 months ago

    Really interesting post, thank-you.

    I totally agree that Google has had this impact on web conversations but I also think that they steer more people into potential conversations too, for example I found this blog post via searching.

    I think the sheer amount of blogs and forums on the net is also a bit of a conversation killer, people simply cannot be bothered to filter the good stuff out of the bad.
    reply
  • Web Design Agency

    11 months ago

    It is a shame that most forum/blog posts are pointless oubursts of spam or keyword bulging SEO posts. Perhaps when robots are intelligent enough we can have interesting conversations with them instead. But for the moment, something needs to be put in place to stop spam and generate discussion.
    reply
  • Mister Gibson

    10 months ago

    I think that the dofollow is a great idea, as long as people keep a check on it responsibly and don't let any spam on their sites then it can only be a good thing, mick..
    reply

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