I’ve been thinking a lot about comment spam lately (I’m only getting 4 or 5 a day, and of those I only need to manually reject 1 or 2). Google, (way back in 2005) pioneered the use of the rel=“nofollow” attribute in hyperlinks; links with this attribute would not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. Seems like a nice way to discourage people from putting comments into a blog if their only goal is to have a link to their site. Thus, one of the very first things I did when I built this blog was to make sure the nofollow rule was implemented in the links to commenters websites.

But nofollow is not without controvsery, and entire sites have sprung up with the goal of explaining why nofollow isn’t so great. But to me it boils down to one thing… if people are putting useful, interesting material on my blog (which you have been… thanks!) then why shouldn’t I share some of my meager pagerank?

So from now on, if you’re taking the time to write, then you darn well deserve a non-crippled link back to your site. Thanks for commenting!