Mashable Goes No-Follow; Awkward Silence Follows

If you don’t know what Mashable is, its OK. A few months ago I would have said you were missing out big time, but it seems now there isn’t much left to see. Basically, its a blog with some sort of community features (that mostly seems to consist of receiving marriage proposals in your Mashable inbox from people who found you through the community search).

Anyway, they focus on internet news, like anything calling itself 2.0. If Facebook farts, Mashable is there with the latest updates. Every once in a while there is an interesting post or something that can actually help you out with internet marketing – most of the time it looks like they’re trying to fit in as many pages in a day as they can.

So what was so great about Mashable? Why did the inane posts have so many comments and such great discussion? Well it made sense that a website for website owners would give them a chance to put a little link juice to their sites. Mashable was a model of an SEO-friendly blog, at least for its users. Not only did your username link to an editable profile page, it also included a link to whatever website you wanted to link to your account. All of the links followed – much SERPage was had. The profile could be written about any topic at all, and HTML was enabled so you could set up matching anchor text to deep pages on any site.

Well, its done. Its over. If you missed the ride its too late to get on now.

Recently (and I’m not sure exactly when), they’ve decided to set the whole site to “no-follow” and they’ve taken the website links out of your comments. Now your posts take a no-follow link to your profile which is also.. you guessed it.. “no-follow”

At first, the comments were replaced by trackbacks. Each post would fill up with half a dozen auto-generated trackbacks from spammy sites with no content of their own to speak of. In a few days, even these guys caught on and realized they weren’t going to get anything from a link exchange with Mashable.

Am I a hypocrite? Yes, for the moment. I’ve converted two of my three blogs to “do-follow” and this is the only one that hasn’t been modified yet. While this site offers the best payout per visitor, it isn’t my top priority right now just because I’m so obsessive about my favorite topics: politics & education. When I’ve finished my round of software updates, I’ll be sure to add the latest do-follow module to websitebuilding.biz

Why? ‘Cuz that’s how the internet should be. If your comment survives my moderation, it isn’t spam and shouldn’t be treated as such by the search engine spiders.

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