No Follow, No Fun?
I was reading Macuha.com’s Getting One Way Links the Evil Way, when I stumbled upon the comment by Yugatech. Here’s a quick excerpt:
I missed the days when SEO was an unknow term in the blogosphere and everyone was linking out like crazy. Then Google invented nofollow and people abide by its rule as if it were the government. It’s no fun anymore.
I wonder why it’s not fun anymore… Back in the those days, people were not conscious about SEO. They just linked to web pages they found interesting, simply because they wanted to let their site visitors know about those other sites.
There were no SEO tactics or plans or any “Aha… I would like to send Google PR juice to that site.”
It was simply: “I want others to know about that site.”
So when we fast-forward to today, some bloggers will link to you using a no-follow tag. In other words, you don’t earn any Google search engine points. But you still gain traffic, right? You still get exposure, don’t you?
So… why isn’t it fun anymore?
For me, it’s still loads of fun! And if blog owners decide to use no-follow, well… it’s their blog. 
And if you want a do-follow link to your blog, well… you can do something about it. 
First posted on Tuesday, 01 Apr 2008
Tags: seo
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I share many SEO rockstars’ belief that the introduction of the nofollow link was specifically made to fight link spamming. Now that Google is enforcing the nofollow link, the inequalities between those who know about it and those who don’t has widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
In short, people who knew about the nofollow rule can exploit it over those who don’t know an inkling what is nofollow. Marghil gave an example of that in his blog post — that bloggers used to exchange links because they like what they’re linking. Now they exchange links because of SEO (specifically getting none nofollowed links) and not because the site is deemed useful (as defined by Google) or entertaining.
The fun that has been diminished is the way bloggers are motivated to give out links.
Thanks, Abe. Looks like some folks tend to put more weight on SEO than simply building each other up just like the good old days. Anyway, I try not to let those things get my down. And that’s why I generally still find all this loads of fund.