Spider:

• A software program that crawls the Internet by following links and indexing webpages.

Spiders are the basis of all search engines.  Google, Yahoo, and MSN utilize these programs to index the content throughout the net.  This is why the debate between nofollow and dofollow links and their effect on search indexing rages on.

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

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First, the definition, courtesy of Dot Traffic Glossary:

Nofollow
A website can direct a search engine spider not to follow a link that appears on it. The idea being that the target website’s ranking will not influence the website indexed. Nofollow attribute values are most often used on sites with user generated content, like user comments and blogs.

Dofollow is basically the opposite of this. Many bloggers refer to this as link love. By allowing the search engine spiders to follow those links, you’re increasing their page rank status and allowing their ranks to influence your rank. Which is not what you want if you’re looking to increase your page rank, necessarily.

There’s a debate raging amongst bloggers and it seems like most smaller blogs are going the Dofollow route. By spreading the link love you’re helping out your fellow bloggers, who are more inclined to reciprocate. Blogroll’s are a prime opportunity for this. The larger bloggers don’t seem to be weighing in on the issue (at least not from what I’ve seen) so perhaps for a blogger with a larger audience they couldn’t care one way or the other.

Since this is a bit outside my expertise, I’ll admit, I posed the question to my 59 Twitterati followers for their opinions:

Shawn Collins of Affiliate Tip: “Event with nofollow in my blog comments, the comment monkeys constantly attack with their spam.”

Scott Jangro of MechMedia: “I’ve been fighting so hard with the spammers recently, I’m starting to question my own long-time use of dofollow.” He also added “I agree with Sam on the size of the blog though. Mine was until the past few days a PR6 which has me on every must-spam list.”

Sam Harrelson of ReveNews & Affiliate Fortune Cookies: “I’m all in favor of spreading the love, but there are SO many gamers out there that it makes DoFollow really unsustainable.” He followed up to say “Would just add that if it’s a small blog, you might make dofollow work. As it grows, it’s just too hard.”

Of course, these opinions totally fall in line with that I’ve observed in looking around. The little guys are all for dofollow to get the word out, but once you cross that line you become a “comment monkey” target. Scott Jangro wrote a really reflective post about it back in February called Attack of the Comment Monkeys (don’t know how I missed it from the RSS feed…).

I think one thing all bloggers and internet marketers in general can agree on is that Spam is a problem. Not only is it definitely annoying, but it also pollutes the well (as Jason Calacanis pointed out in his keynote at Affiliate Summit West last month). It makes a lot of legitimate internet marketing look bad, and it’s a fine line before someone misunderstands persistent follow up and due diligence for the dreaded SPAM label.

Where do I stand? Long time readers of this blog will note that I use links a lot in my posts. Basically I do this for two reasons: 1. I like to give readers an easy reference of what or who I’m talking about. 2. It’s just nice karma. This blog is hosted by Blogger, and according to their Help Center they automatically add the nofollow tag to the templates. Which is probably why I have a page rank of 0.

So I’m going to edit my template as an experiment. For anyone else curious on how to do this for blogger, there’s a great tutorial online here. Let’s see what happens, shall we?

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