ProFollowNoFollowDiscussion

Contents

edit ProFollow

At AboutUs, in our efforts to be the best guide to websites, we are giving link love to wiki pages with good content on our site. If you want to nominate a website as good and deserving of ProFollow, please

  • confirm that the website you would like to ProFollow is a "good actor" on the web
  • edit and build a great page for the site here at AboutUs (we want to reward good content)
  • add a WikiLink to the domain page you've worked on to the "requested" list towards the bottom of this page.

edit Why ProFollow?

  1. To acknowledge good actors on the internet who have
  2. added to this resource by creating a great page on AboutUs about their website.

edit Why NoFollow?

AboutUs is here to be a guide to websites. Originially we ProFollowed everyone, including so called bad actors (spam sites, malware sites, etc) has two possible negative side effects:

  1. It makes search results less reliable because a highly regarded site (AboutUs.org) is linking to a poorly regarded site.
  2. Since search engines are committed to providing good results, AboutUs.org as a whole can be penalized for this linking.

See our blog post for more information.

edit Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of getting your web site to appear high up on the list when people do certain searches on Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. It's one of the most fundamental ways of establishing a solid online presence.

Many of the people who work on AboutUs pages are here to promote their businesses, treating their AboutUs pages as a critical part of their SEO strategies. A good AboutUs page can attract individual readers to your site, but for SEO, it's actually more important to attract "web spiders" -- the automatic programs that companies like Google and Yahoo use to build their search indexes -- to your site.

Web pages often have an embedded code, known as the "nofollow tag," that is an instruction to web spiders; it tells them whether or not they are permitted to follow a certain link. Most (but not all) web spiders respect this instruction. If a "nofollow" tag is set, it tells the spider to ignore the link, so the location of the linked page (in this case, the actual web site corresponding to an AboutUs page) gets ignored.

AboutUs recently made the decision to have their pages, by default, set the "nofollow" tag, denying spiders the right to index web sites. But AboutUs is also turning it off, by request, for pages that people have put work into.

We haven't yet figured out how to make a request, or to whom, or what criteria that person will use to make a decision.

edit What does it mean

if links are NoFollow and how can I tell?

A simple way to determine whether or not links are being followed on a page is to right-click on the page and select “View Page Source.” In that window do a search (Ctrl + F) for rel=”nofollow” and look at the web address next to it. If you don’t find any results for your search, then none of the links on the page have a nofollow attributed to them.

Innviting the search engines to index and follow our AboutUs pages, as shown below, will substantially improve the quality of the relationship and the volume of traffic between the search engines and AboutUs. <meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

Traffic is generally good for business NOT suppressing traffic. Restraining traffic also restrains interactions and generally has the opposite effect. As traffic and business interactions are supported and encouraged, even between countries, all of the various participants experience financial growth and increases in the quality of everyday life. Every pebble thrown into the lake generates innumerable ripples and consequences. I believe that removing any restrictions from indexing and following will send beneficiaL ripples further than we can now imagine. Hugh Brecher

edit What's the opposite of that?

These are the two common versions as generally used in html headers:

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> and
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

Hugh Brecher

edit Currently

What's the current situation with links at AboutUs?

Currently, AboutUsFeatured and AboutUsSpotlighted articles are followed.

  • Featured have gone through our original community process.
  • Spotlighted go through our company process
  • We need to develop a new community process

edit What's the plan?

  1. The AboutUs DevTeam has created a tool for sysops to turn NoFollow on and off.
  2. This page (ProFollowNoFollowDiscussion) is being used to formulate a policy (including making further recommendations for Dev, if necessary).

edit Our action

To avoid linking to bad actors, AboutUs has decided to turn on NoFollow for nearly all external links, with certain exceptions. The plan is to continue to expand those exceptions as far as possible to reward the good actors on the internet, while continuing to withhold benefits from bad actors, or those not interested in building this public resource (e.g. AboutUs.org).

edit Discussions to integrate

edit Requests to turn off nofollow

edit Pending

Please turn off "nofollow" or just switch it to "follow" for each of the following pages, each of which is my work:

jewelry-casting.net

Thank you, Hugh Brecher

Hugh, please see below for the requests that have been granted. jewlrey-casting.net hasn't been worked on yet (it appears) and thus is still pending. TedErnst (talk)
  • Stephen requests BookCapetown.com via email. Suggested that he work on the page a bit more to make it look a little prettier. Kristina (contact me) 12:49, 22 July 2008 (PDT)

edit granted

Hugh has coined the term in the AboutUs Family - :-) ~~ MarkDilley

edit Suggestions:

What if you were to reward editors who specifically found and added content to a certain number of websites that don’t already exist in the wiki? Say, perhaps, at least 3? That, in conjunction with minimum time that you must be a member before getting your links followed, would both cut down on fly by night editors, only interested in adding their own content, as well as encourage people to find new sites to add.

I know that for myself, and I would guess for most people who are comfortable writing content, doing reviews on 3 sites that are not competing with mine would not be burdensome in the least.

Recently sparked by AboutUs.org + Nofollow = Wha...? --Michael VanDeMar

edit More Discussion

As we formulate a concrete policy, sysops have the privilege to turn on follow links. I propose that this privilege be used at the discretion of sysops. For example, if a page for an interesting (and not bad-acting) website has at least a few edits made on more than one occasion, a sysop can feel "liberal" in allowing the links to be followed. Thoughts? Julia 18:01, 24 July 2008 (PDT)

I like this idea and have secretly acted on it on a few occasions. I feel more liberty in the hands of sysops 'and active members will also be a step in the right direction. If i come across a page with genuine effort spent on it to make it a better page, i'll share the AboutUs juice with them. --Sa'ad [ talk•email•chat ] 21:49, 24 July 2008 (PDT)

edit This could be detrimental!

This could be detrimental to the over all page rank of AboutUs.org pages!

This is because one of the factors that Google looks at is the number of external links and how many of those links go to high ranking pages / websites…

Although this “nofollow” edit is more than likely going to remove far more low ranking links… it could also decrease the amount of high ranking links (like the ones to the BBC.co.uk)!!

Because of this I would advise all of the "sysop's" to look at the high traffic websites on AboutUs.org as well as other well-known websites to make sure all of them have there links followed!

Michael Howe

User:stepho123 has done a great job on many pages. Every time I seen him on the AboutUs IRC chat asking for help he has always been very cooperative and his articles are done to a full extent. I think we can trust his pages to be granted to follow links. I changed a few articles as others have as well of his when he went on IRC and requested it. user:stepho123 usually requests when he is completed with the article. Thanks for a great contribution. -- NickBurrus