Yeah, you’re right though. Linking will definitely stay forever, or at least in the foreseeable future. It’s what makes the web great. Can you imaging sites with no links to external sites?

Yes, I think Google is trying to figure out how to adjust their algorithm although the effect of linking will stay forever.

And if your sites can succeed without Google than congrats! I’ll have to take a look at them and see how you make it.

The whole nofollow idea was started with the intention of slowing spam, it didn’t, so now Google has decided to use nofollow as a means to stop paid links on sites. I’m guessing that won’t work either in the end. I don’t believe Google penalizes blogs for having dofollow enabled, they just want nofollow on paid links.

If you ask me, Google needs to reassess their algorithm to fix these things instead of penalizing everyone. When they came up with the algorithm, it probably was a great idea, but the web has evolved and things change, so maybe they need and update to get with the way the web is run today? The one major way it’s changed is the way money is made online, and that’s one of the big issues at hand with nofollow and paid links. If it keeps going like it is, it will get to a point where a lot of people just boycott Google altogether. They don’t own the web and I’m guessing that a lot of bloggers get a lot of their traffic from referring sites, not from Google. Or at least that’s how it is with the sites that I own, so really for me, Google could cease to exist tomorrow and it wouldn’t really effect my sites.

It seems to me like Google is just taking the ‘easy’ way out? I mean, instead of using some of the best minds in the world which work for them to develop a better solution to the problems they’ve created, they place the burden on the webmaster to follow their rules or else be penalized (so they don’t have to change anything). Just seems bass-ackwards to me. Yes, I like to see the little green bar with PR when I load up my site. it’s a nice little ego boost, but if I dropped down to zero, I wouldn’t change anything. I would continue to blog, continue to try and help people when I can and just go on with my life.

Anyway, that’s how I feel right now. Ask me again in a few months after the online world goes through it’s next set of changes, and I might think differently.

Thanks again

“…then I have to check what Google thinks about links and make up my own mind…”

Thank you very much

(And by the way, his blog is a do-follow and he accepts keywords for signatures. I’ve posted a couple there too.)

So far Google (or Matt Cutts) hasn’t said anything about it but in my opinion it doesn’t make sense for Google. They’ll probably figure out how to disregard the links from comments from their algorithm.

I’m sure the geniuses at Google can figure out which links on a Wordpress blog are from comments.

I got myself on a few lists of people who have the dofollow plugin enabled and I found that it brought me a lot of people who were posting with their keywords in the name field just to get a link.

For a while I left it because ‘hey it’s cool I’m getting lots of comments’, but now it’s become obvious that most people ARE commenting so they can just get a link. Of course I put this out there as acceptable on my blog and got on the list so I can’t really blame people for doing it.

Now I’ve put a Blog Comment Policy into place and have told people they need to put their NAME in the name field and that I would allow one link to their website as a signature. I know some people don’t like signatures on blogs either but I think since I did enable dofollow I should allow them the benefit of it.

If I knew that google frowned upon it though I’d probably remove it.

Those are some interesting facts, thanks for sharing.

Can you elaborate more on giving Yahoo a link every few months?

As for Google “owning” the internet, I think that statement is just a bit over-rated. In Asia, Google is nothing and Yahoo! is king. In Africa, Google is nothing and the local whatever is used. In South America you can see the very same thing. It’s only North America and some English-speaking European countries where Google has serious pull on the web. For anyone that’s interested in diversifying thier sites for other parts of the world, the key is to make Yahoo! happy. And that can be done just by giving them a link every few months.

Well … that’s my 2 cents, anyways