Akismet Rocks!

When I originally installed the Akismet plug-in to my WordPress blog, I posted an early set of stats on its SPAM filtering success.  After several weeks of blocking the foul SPAM, I am pleased to provide a quick update.

With over 700 SPAM messages caught, Akismet is working at an astonishing 99+% accuracy!  The very, very few messages I have to deal with is a breeze considering the dozens a day I used to delete.

Why am I sharing this with you?  My hope is that due to continued excellent SPAM fighting with a simple tool like Akismet, I’m hoping WordPress will eventually be configured with an option to turn off the NO FOLLOW process. The NO FOLLOW approach to reducing SPAM is outdated and needs to go away.

Dave

   

DoFollow Used Here!

A comment offered in a previous post, Entrecard Boosting Traffic, caused me to learn something new, and quite important: the DoFollow / NoFollow dilemma.  A new concept for me, but one worth exploring.

First, some background.  Blogs and web sites are of course ranked by search engines in a number of ways.  One is the number of links from other places on the Internet back to that site.  Basically, a show of popularity.  The problem with this is the incentive for spammers to comment with nothing but links back to their sites, mostly in automated ways, to simply fill up the comment with opportunities for the Googles of the world to more highly rank their sites.  All at the intellectual expense of honorable blogs. 

In 2005, Google postulated that if they did not provide any ranking merit when they found the attribute, “rel=nofollow” on blogs, and not follow the link back for merit ranking purposes, bloggers and blog platforms would adopt the setting.  The rationale was that it would be a disincentive for spammers and spamming would, well, stop.  Right.

WordPress, as one blogging platform, adopted the setting.   The challenge for us “average” bloggers on the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit is the lack of awareness of (at least for many of us) this obscure parameter.

I am pleased to announce that the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit is now set up to use DoFollow! The good people at Semiologic provided the DoFollow plugin now used here.  Anyone familiar with WordPress plugins will appreciate the simple ZIP file download and install.  Now, the dreaded NoFollow setting has been disabled!

As an alternate view of this link juice topic, the folks at eVisibility provide an excellent visual example of how the flow of link juice occurs.  Their point is different, in that they are discussing the value of using or not using NoFollow strategically – I just like the graphics.

As a topic for a future post, the other shoe to drop on this topic is the management of spam.  A great tool in Akismet, coming soon!

Dave