I have contemplated to introduce “interview” posts on my blog for some time now. It is a good way to provide your readers with a fresh and maybe some times different prospective. Recently I have come across many outstanding bloggers from whom I have learned many things, and hope to continue to learn. So when you see in the future similar interviews, I will be asking questions that I personally would like to know an answer to. Hopefully you can find them useful as well.
I have decided to limit my interviews only to three questions, hoping that it will not be a burned for other bloggers to take part in such interviews. So my first ever interview is with Andy Beard– an outstanding blogger, programmer and thinker. Enjoy and feel free to comment.
Vlad:
Andy, congratulations on starting “No nollow, I follow, Dofollow BumpZee! Community”. To start off I would like to ask you what are the requirements/limitations for a blogger/blog to be accepted or rejected?
Andy:
The basic requirements are that in some way a blog has removed nofollow from comments and trackbacks. There are a multitude of blogging platforms, and for each platform there may be different ways that this can be implemented.
When I receive a submission, I actually visit the blogs and check for comments that have followable links. This isn’t very time consuming normally, because I use the search status plugin for Firefox and see lots of pink boxes if the blog is still using nofollow.
There are some complexities, for instance there are plugins which only allow followable links for people who comment after a certain number of comments have been left, to reward regular visitors. Other plugins optionally remove nofollow after a certain grace period to allow the blog owner a window of opportunity to moderate them.
In such cases I would explore the archives looking for posts where regular visitors have left a comment, comments that have become activated over time or a statement about which plugin was being used.
On new blogs that haven’t received any comments, I leave a comment myself.
A few blogs might also use redirects for the links, which unfortunately can’t be accepted.
Vlad:
I have read in one of your posts that you call your dad a “computer evangelist”. If I may, I will call you “nonofollow evangelist”. As such do you wish that every single blogger out there would take down “nofollow” from the links in comments ad trackbacks?
Andy:
The strange thing about my father is that he was a computer evangelist, even though the coming of computers actually forced him into early retirement. He had worked in the newspaper industry all his life, most of the time working as a proofreader, and had risen to be head of department with 100 staff on one of the largest broadsheet newspapers in the UK, “The Daily Telegraph”. When computers became more cost effective for proofreading (never better, even 20 years later), the “readers” were mainly out of a job, or took massive pay cuts, and the art of proofreading died off.
Evangelising “dofollow” is strange, because it really shouldn’t be necessary. If blogging software contained clear information and controls, such that all users were aware that nofollow was placed on comment links by default, and there was a transparent, non-geek way to disable nofollow, there wouldn’t be a need to do more than provide enough information on a single page explaining why a blogger should consider removing the nofollow tags.
There are people who have been blogging for years who don’t realise that their comment links have nofollow attached, and it was implemented by the blogging platform developers without any notification within the software, or a way to reverse the process without using 3rd party applications.
Regarding a decision to remove nofollow, I think a lot depends on how active, or even pro-active a blogger is. They certainly should have an effective comment and trackback control system before removing nofollow.
If they intend to go away on holiday for a few months, it might be a good idea to switch off comments and trackbacks. I think other bloggers would understand.
They should also be aware of linking structure on their blogs.
Vlad:
Let say my blog ranks on Google at PR 8 but I like your idea to get rid of “nofollow”. Should I exercise caution doing that? I am sure the good folks at Google may see it strange that my site all of a sudden begins to give credit to so many links. What would you recommend to some one like that?
Andy:
Can you lend me 10 PR8 blogs to experiment with, all in the same niche, with similar site structures and readership?
Here are some key points:
- I always recommend people test things for themselves, thus you wouldn’t place all your eggs in one basket. Introduce changes across your virtual real estate gradually.
- Google keeps a record of all links, and just doesn’t give attribution for links that have nofollow, and in theory Google and MSN don’t follow the links to find what they are linked to, or at least there is no evidence to prove that they do.
- There might be a difference between newly discovered links, and having the same links, but with a different attribute.
- Large websites tend to change their linking structures over time, adding new navigation elements, or taking some away. Internal links are very similar to external ones, and I think Google is probably capable of handling the changes as a natural situation. Many sites have actually done the opposite, such as Wikipedia, and that caused a few shockwaves around the blogosphere, but Google handled it, although we will likely never know if they had to tweak their algorithms to cope.
- If a large site suddenly introduced multiple RSS feeds, and live links to Technorati with every article, Google would cope without missing a step. That could be 10 or 20 external links. A smart site would use links to an internal tagspace, but most do not.
- A large website probably has some level of control over various segments of the site, thus it would be better to make a gradual change, just for testing purposes.
- Site structure is important, you should have a balance between internal and external links on any page. If you only have 10 internal links on permalink page for a blog post, having 100 external links isn’t a good idea. There are multiple ways to add relevant links to internal pages, and even increase the number of internal links automatically, based on how popular a post is.
Hey Vlad,
A question for Andy (which I'll post here out of the same respect he had for you in not reposting your interview on his site). I'll bet Andy will be monitoring…
Andy you state that “A smart site would use links to an internal tagspace, but most do not.” Can you comment more on what this means? Do you have some posts that talk about what this is, and how to implement it? Plus why a “smart site” does this?
I would also be interested in getting pointed in the right direction to learn more about the “balancing of internal and external links” on a page. Is it safe to assume that you are talking about all links that appear on that page at any given time? Meaning, the internal navigation links, tag cloud (internal) links if you have one, contact, disclaimer, about us, etc. And the externals being the MBL, BC, BZ, trackback/pingback/backlinks in your post content? I've not seen information about automating the balance, so any directional pointing there would be helpful to me, and others, I'd bet.
Thanks for the great interview, Vlad!
@James
I e-mailed Andy but I am sure he is going to monitor this. Great questions James, I am looking froward myself to Andy's answers. Thanks.
If you look through my tags on UTW you should find some code on how you can grow tag clouds based on the number of comments someone has left. Very simple.
I use that code on all my single pages – the more comments, the more tags.
By default my pages have lots of internal linkage, and my feeds also have lots of links leading back to my site.
Each blog post that gets splogged often gives me 20 links, from each site.
Tagspaces are simply places you can link to that end with a keyword as a URL. UTW creates this internally, or you could (if you weren't smart) link to Technorati or Wikipedia instead.
Those links, which could then contain rel=”tag” would be used for categorising you content by Technorati, Google, and a host of other services, even if you don't link to them.
More info is on Microformats.org
Note Bumpzee is also a tagspace, and so is Blogcatalog, and both offer feeds of the tags 😉
With some caching that could add some useful content to tag pages, and both sites provide backlinks.
Now is not a good time to jump onboard atgging – WP 2.2 will offer it by default, and that is just around the corner – I have seen some hacks to get UTW to work with the new system, but still haven't tested it. I am hoping for an official solution from Christine.
“Each blog post that gets splogged often gives me 20 links, from each site.”
Andy, forgive my ignorance. Are you saying that you do not mind if your blog posts get “splogged”?
The reason I am asking is that one time a post of mine was splogged along with an affiliate link in it.
I license my content under GPL – which means that as long as it is correctly attributed, I have no problems.
I would have a problem if someone “spun” my content, and didn't claim that the content had in some way been modified.
Most of the sites that pick up my full content give me more attribution than I could ask for, leaving all links intact even to my related content and tag pages.
They also pick up affiliate links.
The one thing I do is if they pick up all my content, I block trackbacks, because that is just a little too much.
What really is the difference between having full content syndicated on WebProNews, and full content on a splog? Only their current number of readers and incoming links. This is from an SEO point of view, not from a credibility point of view, which is different.
In fact WPN for most people used to give a link through to their domain, in a standard footer.
I asked them to change that to a link through to the original article. I am not sure they do that for everyone.
The only problem I have had is when people pick up the content from WPN, and strip off the link back to the original article.
If someone published a “Top 1000 tags to use to get splogged” I would probably buy it, as long as it was from someone I knew and they showed some tests.
Hey Vlad,
A question for Andy (which I’ll post here out of the same respect he had for you in not reposting your interview on his site). I’ll bet Andy will be monitoring…
Andy you state that “A smart site would use links to an internal tagspace, but most do not.” Can you comment more on what this means? Do you have some posts that talk about what this is, and how to implement it? Plus why a “smart site” does this?
I would also be interested in getting pointed in the right direction to learn more about the “balancing of internal and external links” on a page. Is it safe to assume that you are talking about all links that appear on that page at any given time? Meaning, the internal navigation links, tag cloud (internal) links if you have one, contact, disclaimer, about us, etc. And the externals being the MBL, BC, BZ, trackback/pingback/backlinks in your post content? I’ve not seen information about automating the balance, so any directional pointing there would be helpful to me, and others, I’d bet.
Thanks for the great interview, Vlad!
@James
I e-mailed Andy but I am sure he is going to monitor this. Great questions James, I am looking froward myself to Andy’s answers. Thanks.
If you look through my tags on UTW you should find some code on how you can grow tag clouds based on the number of comments someone has left. Very simple.
I use that code on all my single pages – the more comments, the more tags.
By default my pages have lots of internal linkage, and my feeds also have lots of links leading back to my site.
Each blog post that gets splogged often gives me 20 links, from each site.
Tagspaces are simply places you can link to that end with a keyword as a URL. UTW creates this internally, or you could (if you weren’t smart) link to Technorati or Wikipedia instead.
Those links, which could then contain rel=”tag” would be used for categorising you content by Technorati, Google, and a host of other services, even if you don’t link to them.
More info is on Microformats.org
Note Bumpzee is also a tagspace, and so is Blogcatalog, and both offer feeds of the tags 😉
With some caching that could add some useful content to tag pages, and both sites provide backlinks.
Now is not a good time to jump onboard atgging – WP 2.2 will offer it by default, and that is just around the corner – I have seen some hacks to get UTW to work with the new system, but still haven’t tested it. I am hoping for an official solution from Christine.
“Each blog post that gets splogged often gives me 20 links, from each site.”
Andy, forgive my ignorance. Are you saying that you do not mind if your blog posts get “splogged”?
The reason I am asking is that one time a post of mine was splogged along with an affiliate link in it.
I license my content under GPL – which means that as long as it is correctly attributed, I have no problems.
I would have a problem if someone “spun” my content, and didn’t claim that the content had in some way been modified.
Most of the sites that pick up my full content give me more attribution than I could ask for, leaving all links intact even to my related content and tag pages.
They also pick up affiliate links.
The one thing I do is if they pick up all my content, I block trackbacks, because that is just a little too much.
What really is the difference between having full content syndicated on WebProNews, and full content on a splog? Only their current number of readers and incoming links. This is from an SEO point of view, not from a credibility point of view, which is different.
In fact WPN for most people used to give a link through to their domain, in a standard footer.
I asked them to change that to a link through to the original article. I am not sure they do that for everyone.
The only problem I have had is when people pick up the content from WPN, and strip off the link back to the original article.
If someone published a “Top 1000 tags to use to get splogged” I would probably buy it, as long as it was from someone I knew and they showed some tests.