You may or may not have noticed that the latest release of Pligg v9.9.5 has stuck the rel=”nofollow” tag in the link_summary.tpl file.

I have mixed feelings about this.

This tag does help preserve and protect your PR ranking with Google by not having it brought down by bad neighbours.  With running a bookmarking site, it’s almost impossible to prevent people from submitting links that could bring you down the PR chain.

However, this could also hurt your PR, webmaster especially bloggers go out of their way to find places to drop a link that does not use the rel=nofollow.  Once bloggers discover you use this tag, chances are they will not submit to your install, unless your site gets crazy traffic.

Lets look at what the popular social bookmarking site use:

• Digg – no relationship specified
• Mixx – rel=bookmark
• Del.icio.us – rel=nofollow
• Yahoo Buzz – rel=bookmark nofollow
• Technorati – no relationship specified
• reddit – no relationship specified
• Fark – rel=nofollow
• Newsvine – rel=nofollow
• Blinklist – rel=nofollow
• Simpy – rel=nofollow

There seems to be a growing shift to using the rel=nofollow tag by some of the top bookmarking sites.  Please remember though that these sites get hundreds of thousands or millions of hits daily, weekly and monthly.  Your install most likely will not, using the rel=nofollow tag when you first start out, is a judgement call for you to make, but, I highly recommend not using it until you build up a traffic base.

Will you keep or remove this tag from the latest version of Pligg?