A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. As bloggers learn their trade they sometimes make mistakes. Something that I consider a mistake recently caught my eye related to Netiquette. Netiquette refers to that unwritten social code of online conduct. Everyone has their own ideas on netiquette, like posting affiliate links in a forum is one example of bad behavior. If everyone did it, all hell would break loose.
The unwritten rule I have seen broken recently involve Nofollow links or no link at all back to my blog. I don’t mean to point out the following blogs as the only violators. Naming them and linking to them would be a reward, wouldn’t it? Here are some examples I saw this week.
- An experienced SEO blogger refers to me as “Turnip” in their article without linking to my site. Then in a follow up article they quote several ideas of mine without even saying where they got them. Ok, if you are using block quotes, doesn’t that usually mean a direct quote?
- Another Entrecard blogger linked to the above article, but again never mentions me or my site. Oddly enough they do mention CMF ADS. Unfortunately they didn’t link to it, so nobody has any idea what the hell they are talking about.
- Today I receive an award from someone for being their “Top Dropper” for October. Guess how they reward me? With a nofollow link to my site. Wow!
Am I the only person who wonders WTF these people are thinking?
- Are they so desperate for google Pagerank they forgot the basic rules of networking? If someone helps you, unless they ask to be anonymous, you thank them by name. On the Internet, this means a link.
- Maybe they hoped I’d never notice. Using ideas from My Article to write their own article is pretty unoriginal. I’d try to keep the article a secret too then.
- Maybe they afraid by linking to me I would see their backlink in my WordPress admin. Sometimes my comments are pretty scary. I don’t care if you disagree with me. Just spell my name right and link back to me if you quote me.
- Perhaps they had no clue what they were doing. Making every link on your blog nofollow does not help you get higher pagerank. Stick to making affiliate links nofollow and you can’t go wrong.
- If you use my site as a source of info, you quote it. That’s a basic rule of journalism. So which is it? Are you a blogger/journalist, or are you a content scraper?
So once the intitial “WTF” moment passes, what can you do? I suppose you could write them and ask what their thought process is. Normally I will leave a comment giving my opinion and linking to my original article. That’s if I ever find their article to begin with. However, I noticed a pattern of the people who seem to be sufferering from SEO Greed. While every comment URL and Blogroll link is nofollow on their blog, All of them seem to want backlinks themselves.
Give them the “Big F.U.” using the NoFollowFree plugin. Under the plugin settings there is a section that says the following: “Here you can set some commaseparated words. If one or more of these words are found in the text comment I put back the nofollow, just to prevent spammers.”So all you do is paste their name and url into that section and save it. Guess what? No more dofollow backlinks no matter how many times they comment. Since their entire blog is nofollow, what can they say? That I’m not being fair?
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I certainly hope it wasn’t me, but if it was, it was out of ignorance, and not with malice. I love your blog and wouldn’t do anything on purpose to be greedy.
Not you Carol. Of the 3 above, I think only one was done intentionally. Normally I just let it pass, but this week I noticed example after example. The definition of nofollow by google is that it is a link you don’t trust. Using nofollow to try and game SEO at the expense of those you network with is bad form.
Hey Turnip, thanks for the post. It took me some time to look for how to remove the ‘nofollow’ tag on my blogger blog. Finally got down to doing that. Cheers!
Hey Turnip
I could write endless post about what bloggers do and dont do and they aren’t going to change.
My pet peeve like you mention and especially with the ease and multiple ways of taking a second to say thanks with bloggers it happens so rarely that I didn’t expect to hear from you last week or so when I mentioned I blogrolled you
I challenge any blogger to reach out to other bloggers like I do only to get shit on or ignored like I have BUT I LOVE IT cause out of the thousands I have my small crew of real friends to the point I’m not looking anymore and I don’t do things for results or thanks I just do it cause I feel like it;)
Thanks
If I got mad everytime a blogger let me down my head would EXplode
John, I appreciate everyone who links to me. I check my WordPress admin Incoming Links section daily and try to visit every new link that shows up. If there’s a way to contribute to that site, I try to thank them somehow. Sometimes it by private message, other times making a comment on their site. I’ll even take a look at their ads.
CJ: Thanks! Not everyone is obligated to dofollow links. But I appreciate those who do. If the idea of all those dofollow links floating around old posts bother you, go back and make the links in posts older than 1 year nofollow. Im sure plugins exist for that purpose.
If you’re trying to make money from your site, you should be careful about how you link out. PageRank is important, no matter what anyone says. Until Google’s monopoly on search comes to an end, and advertisers stop paying attention to it, it’s important.
With that said, it’s very important to link out, when you’re referring to another person’s ideas, quoting them, or when it’s of use to your readers. In this case, without a doubt, give them the credit (and juice) they deserve.
I’d probably agree with you on all of the specific points mentioned, except for the top dropper nofollow link.
The person is still providing you with value – traffic. The amount of that traffic, will of course depend on the site linking to you. Now if that person doesn’t want to pass juice to you, because you dropped on their Entrecard widget, I’d say that’s a smart thing to do.
Imo, the whole idea of “Top Droppers” is spam all together, but that’s another article in itself.
I confess to being a web noob, and this may be a very silly questions, but could someone please explain what is meant by “nofollow”? I mean, if you put a link to somewhere else in your content, then folks can click on it to get that other place, right? But I don’t see how it is possible to create a link that won’t go anywhere – that’s not a link at all, right? I’m very confuzzled.
Nice post. I am hardly an expert in this area and appreciate the heads up.
Beamer
I’ve had the same kind of things happening to me. There’s on particular blogger in my niche who gets ideas from my blog and yet never posts a link back. I know he got it from my blog, because he’s written within a week of my postings. Usually, if I get an idea from another blog, I start with, “I was reading blank last week and he said” and then go to expand on what that person had to say. I’ve done that several times with links to his blog, so needless to say, it annoyed me when he did it without a mention.
For Gargantua, nofollow simply means that the link is marked so that spiders don’t follow the link. It means that search engines won’t see it as a link back to your blog. Linkbacks are a large part of page rank calculations for most search engines, so if you have links set up as nofollow, you aren’t letting that link be used in search engine calculations.
Thank you Jodith. I appreciate the explanation. I understand it now.
I do not know if doing these things without the relevant links is stupidity or greed, all I know, it is bad manners. Unfortunately there are many blogs out there doing just this.
I love your tip on ‘no-following’ an individual on a ‘do-follow’ blog. This will teach them. I forgot about this little feature.
I talked to the “top blogger” person above and they had no idea how it happened. I’ll have to write a tutorial next post on how to manually change the links one way or another in WordPress.
i am not sure if my default is nofollow, but i am sure that when I link out, i don’t have the rel=”nofollow” added in the html.
I try to always provide a dofollow link to those that have helped me in the past. At times I may link to them in several posts if the topic warrants a link. I also try to provide a meaningful description in the link.
I haven’t really thought about nofollow and dofollow as PageRank isn’t a huge deal with me.
I have dofollow plugin installed, but thanks for the mini tutorial on tweaking it so not everything gets automatically marked.
I don’t think it’s me you’re talking about (as she sneaks back to her site to check), but if it is, then please tell me as I have no intention of doing you wrong T-Man! I’m getting old, though so I may have forgotten something somewhere.
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I don’t like when people who have no follow blogs but then go out of their way to comment on do follow blogs, I just downloaded a plugin which I am trying out that will only do follow blogs that are actually do follows. I think that is only fair
Hmm, I have mentioned you in at least two posts on my blog, that I can recall. And you know, I am not sure if I linked to you! I am terribly sorry– it certainly hasn’t been intentional. I have a lot of Entrecard readers and *everyone* knows who Turnip of Power is. I guess I was caught up in the posting…
I’m going to go recheck my posts and if there is no link back, I’ll definitely link back. I apologize for this! It was pure forgetfulness. Thanks for the reminder of netiquette.
Nope, I checked and I had linked to you. :-p Not that I’m passing any google juice anyway…..
Sometimes people are doing things the wrong way just because they haven’t learned the right way yet.
Example: I did a competition post recently and forget/didn’t-know to do links to people at the appropriate places. No badness intended, I was just ignorant of that etiquette.
A kind blogger-friend pointed this out gently enough and I bust my ass to fix it.
So when/if I do it wrong, let me know and I’ll work fast to fix it. I don’t think I’m alone either.
Interesting post as always.
I hope you did see the incoming link from my site since I don’t use rel=”nofollow” to my top ec droppers.
Sometime in the past, some bloggers tagged me and expecting me to make a post and a linkback but I didn’t see them on my incoming links. I made a post and use nofollow link.
I have no hard feelings to any of the people involved, least of all my loyal readers. It’s merely an educational thing for most. The internet really is a “one hand washes the other” world. It’s the heart of social networking. I know a guy who can fix your html, and you know a guy who can fix my graphics. We trade links, stumble each other’s post, and so on.
Stan just sent me another link he found. The guy nofollows my link, the only one in the article. I’d say “fine”, except every single other link in his blog was dofollow, including the comments. Too weird.
BTW, for those who recently fixed their links, be sure to enter my contest. With so few entries, chances are very good you’ll win something.
I wish I had learned little bit more on SEO and do some sin to make you more angry so that you can write such wonderful article.
I should thank the guys who made you write such a nice article.
Touch down!
I think this is one time I’m glad I don’t write anything that can be considered ‘advice’, that way I can be sure that no one is going to steal my advice and pass it off as their own!
Thanks for the heads up on the nofollow thing Turnip. Eagerly awaiting your tutorial now.
I don’t think it’s malice, Turnip. I once searched the web for info on dofollow, and managed to switch both my English blogs. Somehow. I would have to do the research all over again now though – my mind is like a Swiss cheese. So I’m eagerly awaiting the tutorial too. Please include diagrams…
Not linking to people you quote or mention is another matter – bad form indeed, but as Rebecca says – sometimes one gets caught up in the posting.
Anyway – this article reminded me that I should refresh my blogroll soon. If I can remember the brilliant plan I had for it a while ago.
I’m not entirely clear on this “dofollow” “nofollow” business, but even I understand good manners vs bad manners.
I think the worse thing to see than a “nofollow” link – is to be mentioned in a post without any link to it. Though it cannot pass the link juice, it can still help with the traffic.
Mostly, I see this practice in blogs where bloggers do paid posts and sell links.
Well said..and the wtf moment fit perfectly.
I violated one of those way back, I have to say..guilty as charged on the affiliate link in a forum, I did not know better..I was ripped apart, chewed up and recycled..within 2 minutes. I took my lumps, publicly apologized and immediately removed the link.
It was lack of knowledge..but a lesson well learned, it prompted me to start reading more & learning.
Let us ALL sing a mantra together…
Write all blog posts with nofollow, repeat after me, write all blog posts with nofollow.
You are spot on with this post Turnip. It is common netiquette to reciprocate the link love. People need to stand up to the big bully boys aka Google and make sure they remove the nofollow tag. Loads of plugins which do the job. I wrote a post on nofollow, perhaps your readers might find it of some interest.
Regards
SolReka
Turnip, while I do agree with you, I also *know* that it is not always deliberate. I know one of the people and it was actually through a sheer lack of knowledge that there was an issue. So I don’t think that it is always SEO greed, more just a lack of proper education on the topic.
However after reading through this I had to go back through my blog to make sure I was not being and offender.
Stuart
If any blogger is worried about losing PR juice because of Entracard links or even a blogroll, all they need to do is put them on a separate page, instead of their sidebar.
As far as putting the appropriate links regarding awards and giving proper credit where credit is due for articles and authorship, the links will be one, two or at most three and that shouldn’t affect any PR unless you don’t post a new article on your home page for several months.
That’s my opinion..or as they use to say…two cents.
I’m also not so “tech savvy”, but I understand you and agree completely (especially with the “wtf moment”)
It’s easy to understand good vs bad manners and to me, what happened is just not right.
Rados
Trust me – they don’t know.
I created an 8 Week Power Blog Launch course to teach my blogging clients the “basics” of blogging. However, I’ve been SHOCKED by the emails I’ve gotten from VERY popular bloggers who have told me they learned a LOT from the course! I guess that shows just because you have a popular blog doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing!
Gary: Did you miss the line in the article that says “Naming them and linking to them would be a reward, wouldn’t it?”. If referring to someone as “An experienced SEO blogger” isn’t enough of a compliment, I don’t know what is.
My head is spinning with all the follow/nofollow rules, so I’ll definitely have to read up and learn more! Thanks for pointing out what should be common sense.
As for plagiarism, use Copyscape or a similar service. Not so good for those who shamelessly “borrow” ideas, however. And with ‘spinning’, it’s even more difficult.
I guess when people steal your thoughts and words, you just have to keep telling yourself that it must be good or else they wouldn’t use it!
Great info here, I’m looking forward to reading more! Thanks!