So, I’m thinking ‘lucia’ is an uncommon enough name that suddenly dumping a zillion of my own comments from “The Knitting Fiend” made Google think I was google bombing ‘Lucia.’ So, I figure the remedy is to not link ‘Lucia’ from my own blogs.

People are finding me with searches like “linky love” etc. In that case, that’s what they are looking for anyway.

Anyway, it was added because some people are paranoid someone might dash in, leave 3 and get a follow for some tiny bit of time. They wanted the time too. I figure “no harm in that”. So… I added the feature. I have the “new comment” there so that the few people who keep lists can quickly see the feature is being used. (Very few people use the time feature. )

I agree with you totally on the goal of following comments. At the same time, I am finding I get fewer human comment spams now that some of the spamming companies have figured out there is a hurdle to jump before they get followed.

So, using the plugin means less work for me!
That was pretty much my goal when I wrote the plugin.

Why are you nofollowing your own name, Lucia, really? I mean do you really want to tell the search engines that your name isn’t worth following? That’s the machine message being sent.

I wouldn’t link your name to the blog people are already at, I’d link it to your profile or an important page about you or to you (your plugin page perhaps?) — and thus the engines will increase the relevance to your name, as they should. They should see it as a vote by the site to where our name should link to.

Dave Winer used to make a deal out of when you linked on his name he wanted it to go to his profile page. He clearly understand that if his name was linked to his bio, that would increase the relevance of his bio for his name. Matt from Wordpress is the #1 Matt in Google because every Wordpress install by default links his name to photomatt.

My name when I leave comments usually is linked to my business site and you bet it is DoFollow. Shouldn’t you be telling the search engines to follow your name to the place you most want them to follow?

I’m probably starting to wear on some readers nerves here, so I’ll bow out. People who want to read what I have to say know where to find me Or can use Google on my name if they don’t.

Hope everybody’s weekend is going great. Remember: what comes around, goes around. Spread the love!

And why would someone want a 24 hour time toggle on nofollow on the comments left? Are they not moderating the first comments or something?

I do understand and respect as a fellow plugin author adding features that users like, so I’m not criticizing why that feature is in your plugin, but this just seems like a really silly, useless feature to me as a webmaster. What am I missing?

Frankly, I think some people are getting way too complicated with how they’re using nofollow. Either give it to people or don’t. Don’t make it some kind of obstacle course to navigate to get it. If the same type of effort was put into making the site content quality better as to what links are and aren’t getting nofollowed imagine what the reader response would be like?

This is the part of NoFollow that has troubled me since day one. That it would be used for situations it wasn’t intended. When it came out there was no talk about it using it on text link ads, but over the last year that’s been all the talk. It remains no surprise to me that it’s done absolutely zero to combat spam. It’s just made it worse because now people like those of us who are dofollowing links have even bigger targets on our sites.

I understand the need and importance of moderating comments, and as a site gets bigger the need for a comment policy, but the search engines aren’t going to freak out at your site if on spider pass #7,357 you have a link nofollow and then on #7358 it’s dofollow. Sure, if you link to bad neighborhoods you can be punished but that should be part of normal comment moderation. Just disallow those types of links altogether, don’t nofollow them, just remove them period.

The goal should be to spread the love to those who leave legitimate, on topic comments and thus encourage and promote making the content of the site better and more useful for current and future readers/visitors.