or: Confessions of an embarrassed former slightly-less-than-white SEOer
I’ve just installed the DoFollow plugin to get rid of those pesky nofollow attributes that WordPress adds to your blog by default.
Why? Well because the nofollow atribute contributes close to nothing to the fight against blogspam once you have decent antispam plugins in place such as the beautifully named Akismet and does everything to deter genuine comment. You see, if you have something valid to say about an article I post on my blog, good or bad, I believe you should be allowed a little link love in return if that’s what you want.
Why doesn’t the nofollow attribute help in the fight against blogspam? Well I’ll come clean. Much to my embarrassment, a few years back I was tempted by a combination of flattery and promises of a huge payday-oneday into a situation where my coding skills were momentarily used by the forces of evil. A seemingly charming and straightforward couple of naredowells hooked me in on a promise of a bright new future, but soon had me scraping the seedy underbelly of the Internet by writing hastily concocted perl scripts that used a whole heap of LWP modules to peak and poke the soft nether regions of poorly secured websites.
Their argument that we were actually helping out sysadmins by pointing out their systems’ insecurities sounded to me like a gunman explaining to his helpless victim that he was merely pointing out how poorly constructed human flesh was. Did I mention how sorry I am at this few months of madness that I both endured and, by implication, endorsed?
Anyway, the lesson learned was that the heartlessness of these people was nothing compared to the heartlessness of the spambots that they commissioned. Spambots could give two hoots whether your blog uses the nofollow tag or not. They’re still going to spam you on the offchance that you don’t because it costs close to nothing to do so. The only real defence is actual spam protection in place such as Akismet, which so far, for me, has been 100% accurate.
So feel free to comment on anything I write. If it looks like spam my various antispam plugins will spot them and not even bother me and if it doesn’t, I’ll be the judge (and a fairly liberal one at that).
And please allow this good (very much former) poacher turned game keeper to apologise once again. In my mitigation I’m pretty sure that the coercive slime that tempted me into the arena of dodgy SEO were so incompetent that my efforts fell on infertile ground.
I certainly hope so.
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