Recently, Copyblogger announced that it was ending comments on its site. The decision was attributed to the vast mountain of spam comments (96%), and the never-ending fight to determine the intent of the publisher. It was simply not worth the time, especially now that there are so many other places that discussion and engagement take place.
I wonder, however, how much of that conversation was triggered by emails like the one I just received:
Hello,
We wish to thank you for linking to our site NAME-WITHHELD.co.uk from occamsrazr.com. Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that this link is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
It is important for us to bring our site into compliance, as we have been contacted by Google.
Please add a rel=”nofollow” or remove our link from the following page(s):
…and a list of the links in question. The links are not to any content I provided — it was to a comment someone left on my page. In 2010.
It would be one thing if I had actually manually linked. But either this site owner or the SEO geniuses he was paying at the time left a lot of digital crumbs around the interwebs, and Google is enforcing the new rule about what is cool.
I feel sorry for the poor guy who is having to erase years of questionable tweaking and manipulation.
I also wonder if there won’t be some penalty down the road for me, or other site owners who don’t want to be bothered with tagging “No Follow” on everything.
