(Updated) Follow On No Follow: Will "Fully web-expressed wr

[WPW_Feedbot]

I am still not sure how I feel about this, everyone in the comments field of the last post have valid points to make. As I understand it from the Google Guy post (and I am not sure this really is a "Google Guy" - when will Google just stop being coy and let actual real people make comments?) the rel = tag will possibly extend how comment URLs can be understood, built upon, etc. That sounds like a good thing. But certainly then one question is, do we default to "no follow"? Now, I'm not questioning No Follow simply because I want to ensure that those who leave URLs in a blog's comment space get more search juice. For the most part, I agree with Danny's approach on this question. But what bothers me is that there may well be an ecology that evolves based on the link mojo in comments which we can't imagine, but that would be important and wonderful, and that will not develop if every comment has a tag telling search engines to ignore it. Like it or not, search engines are now processors of our collective reality, and fiddling with that requires some comtemplation. My gut take on this yesterday was "We're making a decision without thinking through the implications." My second gut take was "We can't possibly imagine all the implications." So my third gut take is "Don't do it if we can't imagine what consequences it might have." OTOH, there is much to recommend any system that foils spammers, and ecologies always evolve through a rubicon of conscious choice and unconscious wandering. I have found, however, that using the tools provided by MT, comment spam is no longer a big deal for me. I manage the problem on my end (with...

Read more...