Social Networking | Turnip of Power: The CMF Ads Side Dish

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?