Have a good one.

there must be a different solution to the problem of spamming with links, nofollow is not the one.

So in some places people do rightfully deserve to have links coming back to them for good comments. But on the upper tiers of the blogamid where people are leaving useless little notes as comments in an attempt to get a free ride on the coat tails of popular bloggers it’s a different situation.

Perhaps there should be a plugin for WP that allows bloggers such as yourself to rate (only on a positive scale) blog comments you think deserve credit (even if they may be in disagreement with your thesis). Once a visiting blogger reaches a certain level of rating points they can be featured in a blogroll-like list of regular contributors, have their no-follow links toggled off, or something to that effect. Perhaps have it done on a per-comment basis so that you recieve links back for useful contributions in a post. Or maybe just have something to do it manually without ratings.

As an aside, this quote struck a nerve:

then in order for you to give another blog Google juice, you have to go out of your way to link to them without nofollow, such as in your blogroll

I have yet to understand the whole blogrolling thing but mostly because a good deal of the time they seem pretty shady to me. I’m not talking about short ones like yours or my list of “people I actually know.” I’m referring to those huuuuge blogrolls that are automated to generate traffic amongst groups of people that don’t even know each other. I see on all these blogs, gigantic blogrolls followed by banners from blogexplosion, and a ton of other traffic generating services I can’t even remember the names of. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. So how do these things get sorted out?

I don’t get much traffic to my blog and I rarely get comments and yet I get incoming links from places I’ve never even heard of with no references to anything in my actual site but rather just some automated list in a sidebar drawing from technorati or god knows where else. I don’t care for this type of promotion. I rather have no incoming links aside from ones based on good content that I’ve written.

I have rather uncompromising principles (which could be part of why I have very few visitors, lol) and I’m not about to turn off no-follow on the comments but I feel people should get credit where credit is due and I’ll find alternative ways of linking to or otherwise promoting their worthy content. Under no circumstances could I see myself taking part in a traffic-generating chain-letter-like scheme. Then again, I’m conflicted about blogging in general since most of it I consider to be (in its current state) a poor medium for worthwhile information but I’m hoping to stick with it long enough to see things change. In the mean time, things are going to remain tough no matter what we choose to do. Things will remain a linkfest full of redundant content spread out amongst a small handful of topics. People that don’t play by typical blogger rules will continue to fly under the radar most of the time.

Damn the man! Jā