Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote

Back in 2005, Google evangelized the No Follow tag to be inserted into all links that need not be followed by the Google bot. The links that were immediately designated to default to No Follow in a blog post were the links in the comment and the trackbacks. It was done because a lot of spammers, specially those promoting their medical subscriptions were abusing the public sites like blogs to game the search engines.

The problem was getting compounded by the lack of a reasonable comment spam detector. Due to this bloggers were literally unable to fight back, some responded by turning off comments altogether. All this however changed atleast for Wordpress by the arrival of Akismet. Akismet just simply works, it works such efficiently that I have to rarely delete a comment spam manually. Although it does catches some false positives too, that is some genuine comments also end up being flagged as spam. But this is the price I am happily willing to pay for the hard work that Akismet does for us.

Although the comment and trackback spamming radically changed with the arrival of Akismet, the conventions were never reversed or even re-evaluated for that matter. Wordpress, to this date continues to add No Follow keywords to all the comments and trackbacks, effectively making those links irrelevant for the search engines. This has continued to take away the credit from the sites that genuinely write good stuff and link back to others. It also deprives the commentators who go the extra mile to write a meaningful comment on a post.

In the light of all this, we have decided to announce our new Trackback and Commenting policy which could be stated in one sentence as “You link we follow, you comment we promote”. We have installed the Wordpress DO Follow plugin for comments and trackbacks, and from now on would be following all trackbacks and comment links. This means that if you want your site to have a link on Startup Meme, you could just do that on your own by linking to a Startup Meme story and the trackback on Startup Meme would become a plain old vanilla link to your site. In addition to this we would also be displaying the ten most recent trackbacks and comments in our sidebar with links back to the originating site. Furthermore, the top ten commentators and linking sites would also have their time in the limelight. This would put your site or comment in front of the thousands of Startup Meme readers. Information about our traffic stats could be found here and here.

This is our little contribution in response to your efforts to build Startup Meme into a vibrant and active community on Startups.

PS: Please keep in mind that with the new changes we would be aggressively going after any person or site, whom we find to be spamming Startup Meme.