The NoFollow attribute for all user generated content was originally intended to combat blog spam.   The theory was that a spammer could increase their page rank very easily on search engines by spam commenting hundreds of blogs.  By adding a NoFollow attribute automatically to user contributed content, we would enable search engines like Google and Live Search to know which links to not follow and thus not count towards page rank calculations.

However, today there are so many great anti-spam tools for blogs such as Akimset or the even better Spam Karma 2.2 (which I use).  These tools are  making blog spam a thing of the past.  Spam Karma is catching 10-15 spam comments a day for my blog which is pretty telling since I have relatively low traffic site.  These types of anti-spam tools are making the NoFollow attribute unnecessary; Real commenters should get recognized for their contribution, have their links crawled and positively affect their page rank.

After doing some digging, I found 2 Wordpress plugins that will prevent the addition of the Nofollow attribute:

1. Remove NoFollow - Strips Nofollow from the author URL but leaves in for any URLs appearing within the comment itself.  Exactly what I needed and what I’m using.
2. Link Love - Removes Nofollow from comments after a commentor has made a configurable number of comments.  Cool idea if you need this type of power, which I personally don’t.

I’m sure there are many more plugins out there that will strip Nofollow, some of which will give you much more control. The point is that everyone should be using an anti-spam plugin and abolish the addition of the Nofollow attribute. Share the crawlable love!

So far I’m loving wordpress and my move from Windows Live Spaces has been a great choice.  Wordpress has done a phenomenable job in creating an extensible platform; the sheer amount of plugins, widgets, themes and advice on the web is utterly amazing.

Wordpress makes it very simple to get a blog up and running with features like themes, categories, easy “page” creation and even queueing up posts for automatic posting in the future.

Since migrating all my blog content over, I started to indicate which “categories” each post belonged to.  It didn’t take long for me to notice that the way I was using the wordpress categories wasn’t how it was originally intended to be used.  I was instead using them as tags, which normally don’t have an implied hierarchy, unlike the hierarchical category system that Wordpress offers.

The beauty of tags is that the origanization system is super flexible and allows you to link together content that is hard to do with other methods.  Another reason I love tags is duality it provides for content creators.  On one hand, the meaning of tags can be similar across sites, which allows your users to find simliar content despite the flexible nature of the tags.  On the other hand, since the meaning of tags can differ per application, it gives the content creator flexibility to create new meanings within their own scope.  This duality may be percieved as a drawback, but I personally see this as a powerful, and flexible framework for blogging and to allow users to explore content more powerfully than just following it chronologically.

However, this isn’t to say that categories are now defunct in favor of tags; categories can be more useful in some cases, or even be a secondary source of meta-data that helps in your content organization.  As a content creator, you have to choose carefully which you use, whether it be one or the other, or both. 

For my blog, I see tagging as the only content meta-data I’ll need and categories only hindering the evolution of my blog since I don’t need the structured hierarchical meta-data it provides. (more…)