Link Controversy
Do-follow or no-follow? is it important which you choose, as long as you are open about it? I’ve made changes to this blog that are more extreme than either choice in the hope that it will help with the debate.
What have I done? I have removed the links from commenters’ names altogether.
You read that right. Comment here in the near future and you are guaranteed to get no link love at all.
The URLs are not gone, they are just displayed in plain text now so you can copy and paste to visit the commenter’s blog if you want to.
Am I mental? Perhaps. I want to see what happens, nothing more.
Will it stay this way forever? Probably not, that really depends on the response. That’s the point.
There is a poll (if you don’t want to comment) and and open comment thread on the comment policy page. Let me know what you think.
Comments
Other blogs writing about this
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(http://www.raproject.com/reader-appreciation/poll-turning-off-links-in-comments/) 03rd 03 2008 at 12:39 am
[...] Rather than decide whether to implement Do-Follow or No-Follow in his comment’s section, he has decided to turn off links completely. [...]
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(http://www.raproject.com/articles/six-ways-to-tell-your-readers-apart-through-comments/) 25th 03 2008 at 4:12 am
[...] a commenter’s name as well as a URL is another way to help distinguish between commenters. Many commenters might have the same name [...]
Leave a Reply
I am currently testing a comment link policy which means commenters do not get a link. There is a poll, and open comments for feedback on the comment policy page.
- Get fed with RSS
1
Ronald @ RA Project (http://www.raproject.com) commented at 7:18 am, 2nd 03 2008:
I’ll definitely be following this and perhaps doing a quick case study on the potential of de-linking commenter’s names in the section.
It’s a good idea in a sense of eliminating do-follow and no-follow from the equation.
2
Ronald @ RA Project (http://www.raproject.com) commented at 8:17 am, 2nd 03 2008:
Now that I’ve seen your implementation, I quite like it. Not sure what’ll happen with long URLs though
Maybe perhaps a little DOM implementation where when a user hovers over it, it changes into a clickable link.
3
Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk) commented at 11:31 am, 2nd 03 2008:
Thanks Ronald,
I was thinking about using some Javascript to make them clickable but I thought I would go for something a little more extreme for the purposes of the debate.
4
Louis Liem (http://www.homebiz.bukiki.com) commented at 1:18 pm, 2nd 03 2008:
I don’t mind no-following at all. but i prefer a live link (nonfollowed) than a plain text. it saves a bit of microcalories for extra clicks and paste it to my address bar.
off topic: does your comment section work with cocomment? i don’t see my cocomment here…
5
Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk) commented at 4:48 pm, 2nd 03 2008:
Thanks Louis,
There is every chance that it won’t work with cocomment, but I don’t know how it works so I can’t say for sure.
6
inspirationbit (http://www.inspirationbit.com) commented at 6:59 am, 6th 03 2008:
I don’t mind no linked names at all. That’s not the reason why I comment on people’s blogs. But like Louis, I prefer to have a clickable link, instead of select+copy+past - just being lazy here
It is an interesting experiment nevertheless. Curious to see the results and findings.