I had just turned on my computer when a notification popped up in the lower-right corner: someone had left a comment on my blog. At first I was genuinely excited. Then I clicked through and saw what the comment was about.

My mood dropped immediately.

The accusation was that I had added a nofollow tag to a blogroll link. But why would I do that?

After thinking it over, the most likely explanation was that the person had checked the link using the friend-link detection tool on chinaz.com. That tool is useful, but it is not perfect, and this is exactly where it can lead people astray.

Near the upper right side of my blog, there is an active readers section, like this:

The tool detected nofollow on the links in that area, and then reported that there was a problem with the blogroll link.

But that is not a problem at all.

Anyone familiar with blogs should know that links in sections like this are often marked with nofollow to avoid passing link weight around unnecessarily. The same goes for personal homepage links in the comment area. That is standard blog behavior. Some sites even route those links through redirects first. None of this is unusual.

So I can only imagine what happened: the person saw the warning in the tool, got excited, and rushed over to leave a comment. What I do not understand is this—if someone already knows what a nofollow tag is, why not simply right-click and inspect the source code before making a claim?

Maybe that was only an excuse. Someone in a group chat suggested that the real issue was that they looked down on my new blog. Fair enough, the site had not been online for long. But I had already made things clear, as shown below:

At the very least, this whole episode was a reminder of something simple: think a little more before speaking. Otherwise, you can end up hurting someone else while making yourself look foolish too.

Truly, strange people do strange things. To borrow a blunt internet phrase, I was honestly speechless.