WordPress forum thread: How to produce an entire book on WordPress blog.
Speaking of interesting threads, here’s a great mobilethread on obscure novels. Notable mentions: Codex Seraphinianus, Will Cuppy’s How to be a Hermit, and Frigyes Karinthy’s Yes Sir.
I haven’t even discussed this with David Rothman, but I am now removing link condoms from URLs in comments on my idiotprogrammer blog. Link condoms, according to seomoz are, “any of several methods used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrimental results of endorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link spam in user generated content“. The blog companies collaborated with Google to add the “nofollow” attribute to comments in order to prevent spam comments from receiving high placement on search results. (Wikipedia now is using link condoms on external links as well). 
Here’s a list of arguments by a group opposing nofollow:
- nofollow does not prevent comment spam
- nofollow is confusingly named
- nofollow harms the connections between web sites
- nofollow is not useful for humans, just for search engines using PageRank or a similar technique
- nofollow could be used to shut Web sites out
- nofollow discriminates legitimate users as spammers
- nofollow heists commentators’ earned attention
- nofollow could be used to further discriminate weblogs
- nofollow prevents the Web from being a web
- nofollow eliminates the dissemination of free speech
- nofollow was developed in privacy with only search engines companies taking part in the discussion
Link Condoms sounded like a good idea at the time, but one unfortunate effect of link condoms is that it becomes practically impossible for self-publishing authors to be seen by search engines unless they pay for advertising. On my personal blog, I carefully monitor comments and akismet handles the rest, so I don’t have a problem with commenters mentioning URLs. Most of the people who comment on my blog are writers or artists like myself, and I have no problem with giving them a little link love. (On a bigger blog like TeleRead, this might be a little harder to implement).
Fortunately, solutions are only a wordpress plugin away. In a nutshell, Dofollow wp plugin seems to handle the job admirably.
So, gang, how do you feel? Should the TeleBlog retain the link condoms?
In theory I like the “wide and open” angle. In practice, I worry about vile and greed-driven sites benefiting from occasions when legit site operators do not prevent the comment spam from appearing, and what’s more, I doubt that big media outlets will pay that much attention to what’s happening.
How do you feel? I myself think Google and the blog companies are right here. The way for self-published authors to promote themselves is to get others to write about them and also to create attention-worthy sites that others can decide, on their own, to link to.
This will reward the better self-published folks, who can put more effort into their own sites, email lists and so on, and less effort into comment campaigns.
Just my hardly infallible opinion here.
Thanks,
David
I don’t understand what no follow has to do with self-publishing authors. Most links are not nofollow and a good author will get googlerank from reviews and commentary. I also disagree that nofollow has no human purpose. It allows one to discuss a site without endorsing it or improving its ranking and so exposure.
Sadi Ranson Polizzotti is a distinguished poet (and Teleread contributor). How many blogs or publications have linked to or reviewed her online poetry? How many times has she commented on other people’s blogs?
I’ve been using DoFollow on my site for some time (before that I used a less flexible plugin to do basically the same thing).
One of the things I like is that I can have it configured to keep the “nofollow” for X days, which gives you a window to remove spam comments before the “nofollow” is taken out. I feel that if someone takes the time to participate on my site they deserve the “link love” (and if there’s an otherwise useful comment with a spammy link there’s always the “Delink Comment Author” plugin which just removes the author link from the post).
I think folks who contributeto a blog by commenting ought to get a little link love. Yes, some folks abuse this, but I think Akismet takes care of most of the spampliments, doesn’t it?
BTW — thanks for the tip about Do Follow! I’ll install that on my site.