There are times when you might want to retro-actively add nofollow to links you have given freely in the past. As an example some time ago I started using the nofollow Wikipedia plugin.

Well, today on Webmaster Radio I presented the finding from the first rel="nofollow" test. A few minutes later in the chat room I was presented with a link to another blog. The post read as follows:

The first rel="nofollow" test is complete and the results are as expected. To avoid the results getting tainted we were unable to provide the specifics as to how the test was being run. Well, that’s not the case anymore.

Having spent so much time over the last 6 months evangelising the adoption of dofollow plugins and solutions to remove nofollow from comments, the last week has been filled with highs and lows.

Mathias Schindler, board member of the Wikimedia Germany association, reacts on recent accusations that Wikipedia doesn’t “nofollow” certain links to their own properties, like Wikia.com, while nofollowing links to competitors, like Wetpaint.com (HTML’ified, my emphasis):

So now people have calmed down a little from their running around like headless chickens leaving comments on every blog they could find that used Dofollow, and then linking through to unrelated content, lets start looking at how to link a little more strategically.

Armen has One Stupidly Simple SEO Tip to give you.

Measuring the quality of an ad system

Many bloggers and other website owners around the world aren’t selling their content these days, they’re financing their site with advertising. Almost every ad system seems to be a compromise. You can measure this compromise across different parameters: is the ad relevant? Is it unobtrusive? Is it disclosed? Is the product or service advertised fair to users? Is the ad directly influencing search engine rankings? Is the ad creating a conflict of interest? Is the ad obfuscating the voice of the website owner?

As most of my readers are no doubt aware, I am a strong supporter of sharing the link love, but I always advocate sharing it in a focused manner, preferably from relevant content or from comments and trackbacks. If you trackback/pingback this blog you receive a reciprocal link between highly relevant content automatically, and not only Google and other major search engines count the links as relevant, but also blogging search engines such as Technorati, though with Technorati it is best to do it on a more recent post.

If you want to share the love from your blog, I compiled an extensive list of "dofollow" and "nofollow" resources covering major platforms such as Wordpress (on your own domain), blogger and Drupal. It is also possible on Typepad, and Dawud Miracle and Karen have been discussing ways to present the complicated procedure to remove nofollow on Typepad. Hopefully I will be able to link to a solution soon.

Google Webmaster Tools recently added the neat capability of seeing a good solid list of inbound links to your site, and allowing you to download the entire list in a spreadsheet file.

Owing to Danny Sullivan’s post on how search engines handle meta tags, Google’s Vanessa Fox has written a post on how Google handles these tags.

The

Wordpress by default, just like other blogging platforms, has automatically been adding the "nofollow" microformat extension to all links from user generated content such as comments and trackbacks. To support the growing rejection of NoFollow for blog comments, I have compiled this list of plugins that help you remove nofollow from your blog forever.

A recent Google Groups thread draws attention towards Google’s way of handling nofollow attributes in links. Way back Google posted an entry where they tried to clarify their nofollow attribute. However, the real picture is still not clear.

I was a supporter of the nofollow link, which told search engines not to count that link in their popularity ranking algorithms.

But, after seeing Loren Baker’s post about how lame nofollow is, I find I’m changing my mind.

Loren Baker is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it any longer. He’s nailed his 13 reasons why the NoFollow attribute sucks to the blogosphere wall and banned them from Search Engine Journal.