For those of you who don’t know about LinkLove, it’s a wonderful plugin for WordPress by  Andrew Timberlake which automatically disables the nofollow attribute in links for people who’ve left at least ten links. I absolutely love the plugin and strongly believe in rewarding positive contributions to my blog but recently I’ve decided to deactivate the tool for a number of reasons.

First, I’m getting slammed with keyword spammers. These are people who constantly post comments using names like “Car Sales” and “Dog Treats” in hopes of generating back links from my website to theirs. In theory I don’t really mind but this week it’s become a significant issue so I’ve elected to deactivate the plugin for a while to see if it helps calm the keyword spam a little.

My second reason for deactivating the plugin is that I’m getting ready to make a few significant changes around the site. A lot of you may have noticed that my blog’s changed looks significantly over the past several months. This wasn’t an accident, I’ve been trying different design elements and marketing combinations to determine what designs and content works best for me. After a long period of experimentation, I’ve finally determined what I need from thisismyurl.com and so I’ve started programming a new theme in earnest to help build a better online presence.

What does nofollow mean?

When a person creates a link from one website to another, it’s voting for the second site and telling Google that site A believes site B to be of equal or greater value to the web. That’s great for people like me who post links to other websites because it helps Google know which websites I have faith in but the problem comes in that when people post comments on websites, they can promote their own content regardless of how I feel about it.  That’s where the nofollow tag comes in. In effect, it tells Google that while I’m willing to link to the other site I don’t want to ‘vote’ for it.

The process of voting for a website gets more complicated when you take PageRank into account. Effectively, when I ‘vote’ for a website, I’m telling Google that I trust the website enough that I’m willing to stake my reputation (my PageRank) on the content of their website and that Google should transfer part of my reputation to them. Again, this is wonderful for websites that I truly support and read but not good at all for websites that I don’t actually read or support (such as those people who keyword bomb my site).

Is my website now only nofollow?

Not at all, in fact I believe my decision to turn off the fantastic LinkLove plugin will be beneficial to all my regular readers because it’ll cut down on spam comments but more importantly it’ll give me the time I need to start really focusing on helping others build their online reputations by reviewing and promoting websites I love to read.

If you’d still like a free, nofollow dofollow quality link from thisismyurl.com to your website there are a few easy ways to earn it:

1. Invite me to be a guest writer on your website. Boy do I love writing and this can be a win-win for you! With the new design almost finished, I’ve included a special area for posting links to articles I’ve written around the web. These are prime, dofollow quality links that will be used to help promote websites I love to work with.
2. Offer to be a guest writer on my website. I know it might not always seem like it but I do appreciate that I don’t know everything, so why not help me out? Contribute an article to the website and earn a strong link back to your site.
3. Send me a Pingback by posting a link to my content on your website. Next time you’re writing an article, why not take a look to see if there’s anything here on thisismyurl.com that you could use to support your article? Pingbacks happen when your blog posts a story with a link to a story on my website and will always appear nofollow free.
4. Sponsor the site by placing a 125×125px banner on the site, it’s a great way to help show your support as well as increase links back to your website.
5. Do something amazing on your website and tell me about it on Twitter. When I retweet it’ll appear here on the site as well as travel out to over 1,000 followers.