You might remember our May announcement that we would cease following external links on AboutUs.org, pending a review of our policies and practices. We’re happy to say that we’ve completed the review, and we’re once again selectively following external links on our site.
As before, the default for our site is not to follow external links until an editorial review by our staff determines that they offer real value to AboutUs.org visitors. We’ve resumed following links on all pages created by community members that we’d previously reviewed and that had followed links.
As we said in the original blog post, our decision to no-follow stemmed from the confusion we’d caused by following external links in content we’d been paid to create. We had given the impression of selling links, an activity that’s frowned on by Google, and one that we ourselves don’t endorse.
We still won’t be following links in any content we are paid to create.
As always, we welcome edits by community members who want to share their knowledge of websites. If you edit the AboutUs domain page for a website you think is great, you may request an editorial review by emailing DoFollow@AboutUs.org. If you’ve added good information to the AboutUs page, one of our staff will review the website you’ve written about. We’ll follow the links if we agree the site is valuable for AboutUs visitors.
Our goal is to create a place for people who want to find websites on the topics that interest them, and for website owners and operators who want to promote their sites. We made the decision to resume following external links so we could serve you better.
—-
Note: Two days ago, community manager Kristina Weis emailed a handful of people who had contacted us personally about the change to no-follow, letting them know that we have returned to following external links after an editorial review. Carter Cole blogged about the change. We’ve heard from a few more people that they’re happy we’re following links again.
If you have any questions or concerns about link following on AboutUs.org, email Help@AboutUs.org.
Related posts:
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
first off, make this a nofollow.
It seems like reviewing the content would be the best practice. If the link is of value, it would make at least some sense to pass on some link love. So often you get people that comment on blogs with “nice post” and have nothing of value to add and it just gets out of hand. I agree with the idea of keeping/making paid articles on the site nofollow links as that would indeed make it a paid link but be placing preference on more established businesses in a way.
Hi Bill,
Great idea! We do it a little differently, curious what you think about it. First off, if the comment is obviously real – as yours is – we leave as is.
Secondly, if the comment is a little sketchy, but holds some value – we change the link from the website cited, to http://AboutUs.org/DigitalLifeCycle.com (using your website as an example) to direct people to the wiki page about the site. Sometimes we see that the website doesn’t yet have a wiki page on AboutUs and we wonder if the commenter is real.
Last – if it is obvious spam – we try to delete it.
What do you think about these steps?
Best, Mark
Glad to see the reversal of the previous decision, though it was somewhat understandable. I think the quality control measures you use are a reasonable effort to address potential spamming issues. Keep up the good work and best of luck.
I too approve your decision to doFollow links again.
I confess that at beginning I did not agree your first decision, but now after the discussion on the blog I understand you made a correct action.
Keeping strong reliable rules for the site is the best way to build up a great http://www.aboutus.org !
Roberto
This is great news and represents a balanced approach to linking. Paid linking is bad news. But linking out to relevant content. Google only penalises sites simply selling dofollow links with no value-added service.
Dofollow links to quality sites from yours can have a positive effect on your rankings! If you charge for a service such as a review of the listing (not the link itself) – like Yahoo do – then there is no problem.
Google only frowns upon ‘excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank’.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76465&cbid=-18byp3z1i9w9d&src=cb&lev=answer
Aboutus.org is clearly not an affiliate site. Pages are user-generated and so add value for users.
Indeed it looked unnatural and inorganic for a large website like this not to link to many other quality websites – especially when the content was clearly about them!
A link is a vote. And Google likes websites that vote for other *good* websites, especially those with *related* content. It’s very much the whole spirit of hyperlinks and indeed the world wide web.
The debate about no-follow do follow will go on for ever?
Ironic, SMM, that you should contribute a comment like that to this thread.
Good move, Aboutus. Hopefully others will be brave enough to do this.
Bill, Ben and Roberto – many thanks for having a great discussion about this! With folks like you in the community, who know so much about what we all are trying to do and how the web works – AboutUs can only continue to grow as a great resource for the web.
And James – thanks for the humor
@Mark, As posted on your July 22 comment to this post, I think you guys have a great practice of changing the link to aboutus.org/website. That method can still help drive traffic and awareness to a website but of course does not pass on any Google juice… after all the reason to build links is to get a better rank on the SERPs and get more traffic (right?).
The term link building has become very broad and I think should be seen as a natural practice. IMO companies like Nike and Aboutus do not need to hire SEOs to do link building efforts as their brand (and content) is sound/quality. If you have good things to say and practice good business other websites will natural link to you.
There are many somewhat-artificial ways to build your link profile (like article marketing or guest posts on blog) but I believe that Google wants to see a natural link growth which is achieved through quality content and websites finding value in your services.
There is somewhat of a “Do-Follow” revolution going on. Many sites have actually united to form what I call a Do-Follow Fellowship” (no matter if you want to call it Do Follow, Do-Follow, do-follow or dofollow). For example, the; Do Follow Blog Directory http://followlist.com
Even Google finally understands, that dofollow makes more sense as a general policy to promote comments and interaction with readers.
When Google first launched Knol, they “…began with all pages marked with a blanket “nofollow” directive. This means that Google and other search engines would not crawl outbound links from knols, and those links would not flow PageRank to the pages to which they point. The advice Google provides webmasters is to make links “nofollow” if they represent untrusted or low quality user contributed content.” – Google (see http://knol.google.com/k/follow-vs-nofollow-links-in-knol#)
We are now at a point where we “trust” a certain fraction of authors and a certain proportion of user contributed links, and so we now use a “follow” directive for links within such knols.
Personally, I could vote to do away with nofollow completely. If to many spammers infiltrate a sight, I guess somebody would either need to moderate or reader would just have to skip over the spam. Readers have been skipping over spam (ads) in newspapers, classifieds, eBay, etc. for years, so I guess they could do the same on comments.
Thomas – I like where most of your comment is going – what I see is building a trustworthy web. That has been an internet age old goal. I like to think that AboutUs is part of that endeavor.
I am not so sure I want to ignore spam instead of minimize it though! So much of it with the minimization attempts already!
Best, Mark
Thanks Mark, for responding to my comment and for your great attitude regarding the dofollow issue.
I agree it would be really hard to ignore all the spam, but sometimes it is even hard to define what is spam and what isn’t. In a way, it lies within the heart of the person, and his or her intentions, whether they are a spammer or not. Anyway, like you said, in view of all the spam minimization attempts already, we can only do our best to keep it down and ignore the rest.
That being said, I love your AboutUs website, concept and services, and am now a user listed as: http://www.aboutus.org/AssEtEbooks.com
I will be using and recommending your services, referring users, commenting on your issues and reading your replies.
Interesting how you allow a followed link on http://www.aboutus.org/AssEtEbooks.com which is in the post above mine and yet the level of content on this page is actually very poor.
Perhaps you could explain why this page deserves a followed link? I don’t see any effort or evidence of high quality content here.
@Ben That isn’t an exceptional page yet, but work has been done on it and it’s certainly not a bad page. I followed the page’s links and asked him to add a summary to the very top of the page, which hasn’t happened yet. Plus, Thomas is very nice
Let me know if you have any questions, Ben.
So should this page get a followed link given work has been done on it: http://www.aboutus.org/UnderfloorHeating1.co.uk ?
@Ben Yep, that page looks good and I have followed its links. That key thing is that we need to know about the page in order to follows its links, so we ask people to email us and point them out so we don’t miss any good ones.
I truly appreciate this post. We need to have way more people today like you bringing value towards the community. Can I put this post on my blog? I’d give you credit and link back of course.
That would be great Shayne! I have also created a community wiki page for you here at AboutUs http://AboutUs.org/TheNFLfan0829.LiveJournal.com Best, Mark
{ 1 trackback }