Use Link Love to show people some link love

Back when there was a Gillmor Gang to regularly listen to, I remember being halfway confused about Steve’s obsession with “gestures,” in the internet.

I have, of course, spent the required five minutes of thinking time to get my head wrapped around it, and I now think he’s got the right idea (or at least, the idea I got from his idea is the right idea…you with me?). When you have tons of people on the internet trying to form communities, everything is linked by “gestures” - mostly those are links.

When you leave a comment in someone else’s blog, that’s a gesture (my definition). So is subscribing to feeds, mentioning people or sites in podcasts or videos - if Scoble wears a Wordpress shirt, that’s a gesture.

We’ve recently discovered a neat little Wordpress plugin that can help you enable these gestures in your blog: it’s called Link Love. (Now on this site as well as our Web Community Forum blog).

The idea is that Wordpress automatically inserts a “nofollow” tag in all links that people add to their comments. This tells Google, essentially, to ignore the link. That means that people can’t bump their search rankings just by leaving comments with links to their sites (and yet spammers try it anyway…)

This plugin sets it so that anyone who comments regularly (default is 10 comments, but you may set the number as you like) gets those pesky “nofollow” properties removed. Now their comment links actually count for something in Google.

I think this is an awesome way to reward regular commenters, and also encourage people to leave comments. It’s also (wait for it)…a gesture. See? I told you it was everywhere.