ActiveRain Adds Nofollow to Free Profile Links
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on February 18, 2010
I just noticed ActiveRain.com added the nofollow attribute to outbound links on free profiles. I’m not really sure when this happened, but I estimate it was within the last month or so.
Well that’s another great “free” link-building resource down the drain. For $39/mo you can pay for dofollow links by signing up for their Outside Blog subscription. That membership will allow you to show your ActiveRain blog posts publicly as well as dofollowing your outbound links.
When social networking communities build a subscription based service with the only real benefit being dofollow links, should they be penalized for selling links?
Should they be encouraged to dofollow or nofollow across the board?
I don’t know what the right answer is.
What do you think?
Side note: Usually when a new social networking community launches without implementing nofollow on free profiles, they are only doing it in order to draw in the herds of members who understand what a dofollow link means. Then, once they have enough members to show the venture capitalists or whomever, they quickly add nofollow and force you to pay if you want to continue receiving link-juice from them. Unless you have unlimited funding and marketing dollars, you kinda have to dofollow links in the beginning..
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Bob Stewart
We had to do it, we didn’t want to. We were literally getting bombarded by spammers setting up profiles for this reason.
Wesley LeFebvre
Yes, it does help rid SPAM. It is just sad for those who helped build the community by creating solid free profiles and contributed frequently. I knew it was imminent, though.
Gil
It is very sad when the “game” gets changed on those of us that try to be honest in our link building. The no-follow is common on some social media sites now. I just avoid those and use the ones that I like that have the follow attribute. This is a similar move to Directories that start out with free listings and then switch to paid only listings. If you got in early, generally you are OK, but a few will actually purge all the listings they have taken in and then only list those that pay subsequently–fortunately this is only done by a very few. Most will leave you in the Directory once it goes to paid only. I guess these things are like the rest of the internet world–times are always changing.
Wesley LeFebvre
Hey Gil! Good to hear from you again. Yeah, it sucks for new businesses, but the old businesses who are grandfathered in are sitting on Gold! With most sites implementing nofollow going forward, I’m not sure how new businesses are supposed to get their site ranking or even just indexed for that matter, without paying an arm and a leg to Google approved link sources. While those sites get a free pass to do whatever they want, the lack of competition is only going to continue drive the prices up.
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