Thursday, June 7, 2007

Clarification of NoFollow Hacks on this blog

A recent discussion in the No To Nofollow community at Bumpzee raised concerns over the hacks presented here on this blog. I hope that this post will clear some of air on what the hacks are capable of -- and what they are not.

1. There are no hacks to effectively remove Nofollow from Classic Blogger templates that are hosted at Blogspot. And there never will be, it is impossible.

2. The hack for removing Nofollow on the newer Blogger Layouts (XML) only affects the commenting Author's link. Nofollow cannot be removed from the body of the comment. There are no hacks that can effectively remove it, nor will there ever be.

3. The hack for Classic FTP (self-hosted)Blogger templates require PHP. The hack removes Nofollow from both the commenting Author's link and any link present in the body of the comment. That hack was first published here

There is also an update in regards to the FTP hack. It has come to my attention that
anyone using a double-quote within the comment will break the code. This is due to
the fact that I captured Blogger's CommentBody variable with double-quotes. The
Author's link is not affected and functions as written.

The portion of the code for stripping Nofollow from the comment body needs to be
revised back to it's original form for the time being. I am working on a fix and will
post it as soon as I can.



[rant]The policy of Blogger to force Nofollow onto it's users and make them jump through hoops to install hacks like this is ludicrous. That also goes for other Blogging Platforms as well.

Numerous hacks and plugins have been written, some so shoddily that they confused even me. It simply amazes me how much time has been wasted on just this one facet of blogging. Then there are the evil-doers who want to make a buck off of it (but I am not going there)

Blogger needs to revise it's policy and allow for a new setting in the Dashboard to allow us to choose for ourselves. They can have it set to Nofollow as a default if they wish. Just give us the choice.[/rant]

2 comments :

Joseph Dunphy said...

"The policy of Blogger to force Nofollow onto it's users and make them jump through hoops to install hacks like this is ludicrous ...

Blogger needs to revise it's policy and allow for a new setting in the Dashboard to allow us to choose for ourselves. They can have it set to Nofollow as a default if they wish. Just give us the choice."


Agreed, but remember that Blogger is part of Google. Remember Googlepages? The place had a feature that annoyed countless users - one was forced to use templates on the main page of one's site. Not offered templates for one's use if one wanted them, but forced to use them whether one wanted them or not. What was the point of that?

Many users complained about this, and what did Google do? The company announced the closing of Googlepages and its replacement with Googlesites, where template usage is forced on the user on EVERY page on his site. There is a strong, contrarian streak that runs through Google's management style, and our friends in development just are not going to listen to reason on an issue like this.

I've sometimes used a service called Haloscan on my blogs. I don't recommend it for a few reasons - old comments become archived and inaccessible unless one pays for the upgrade, and they force nofollow on the user as well - but I noticed that when the template is redone to enable haloscan on my blog, that Blogger is willing to link to Haloscan without nofollowing.

Maybe that's where the hack is - have somebody create a near-clone to Haloscan that doesn't force nofollow, or otherwise behave evilly. I know that's a lot to ask, but I wonder if it might be the only thing that would work. The Blogger comment pages are so uncompromisingly, uncustomizably ugly that there probably would be a real demand for such a service, if anybody offered it, for reasons that go beyond nofollow, so this might be worth somebody's while.

Anonymous said...

In order to use 3rd-party commenting services in the manner that you describe would require the use of server-side scripting such as PHP. This way the comments appear as part of the page and the links will get counted.

Haloscan, I believe, uses a piece of javascript embedded in your template and that is not the same. The bots cannot read (or interpret) javascript, so the comments are basically invisible to them.

I think a simple solution would be to allow us to at least have a choice. Put an option for it in our dashboard settings, or better yet, more control at the commenting level to selectively nofollow/dofollow idividual comments. We both know that ain't gonna happen.