R.I.P. nofollow
If you believe what some notable bloggers are saying, the microformat rel=”nofollow” is practically dead. What started as a very idealistic move to curb blog and comment spam has now given up in favor of other more relevant methods.
While there are no strong statements that say “nofollow is dead,” the way bloggers talk about it says it all. Lorelle VanFossen (of Lorelle on WordPress fame) mentioned it on the Blog Herald. Plugin authors are creating anti-nofollow remedies. Sites like nonofollow.net have sprung up, and even made a “manifest” against nofollow.
The hottest news in the blogosphere is the final declaration that rel=”nofollow” is dead. It started out as a good idea to take the fun out of comment spam, but it didn’t work. Currently, WordPress automatically turns on nofollow on every link side of a comment. There are several hacks to remove the nofollow directly from the core programming. Or you can remove it with the following WordPress Plugins
Why the clamor against nofollow? I think it’s because this solution was flawed from the start. Link spam is basically done by spammers to get SEO juice from blogs and other social media sites (like Wikipedia, for instance). This is very mechanical. Spammers publish links on spam blogs or in the comment threads of legitimate blogs. Google (and what’s-its-name search engine) bots then pick up these links and index these, but not before considering the link from the original site in accounting for pagerank and other metrics.
Adding a nofollow tag to all links (i.e., <a href="http://somelink.com" rel=nofollow">) makes sure Google does not follow these links. This was thought as making spamming pointless, because theoretically, the search engines (so far Google, Yahoo! and MSN) won’t give the linked sites any importance.
But there’s still a ton of comment and blog spam around, isn’t there? So maybe the spammers don’t care, since there are still those sites not “protected” by nofollow. And people still get headaches having to delete spam comments or having to wade through moderation queues just to look for legitimate comments.
So has nofollow done its job? Maybe it’s time for nofollow to retire, in favor of other stronger and more relevant ways to stop spam.
Nofollow might be dead for blog comments, but nofollow has done a great job and will surely continue to be used.
SE results have become cleaner, and commercial/affiliate links don’t deserve to be followed, unless they really are related to the entry. People saying that nofollow is dead, spend a little too much of time in the echo chamber and forget interesting warnings from people such as Matt Cutts.
Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.
But I agree that nofollow has no future as spam killer anymore, with services such as Akismet and Spam Karma. And a correct usage of nofollow surely influences your TR. Why would TechCrunch otherwise use nofollow for the 125*125 ads.
Franky said this on March 2, 2007 2:10 am
People, read the manual.
Nofollow was never meant to stop spam.
That’s what Akismet et al. are for.
Repeat 100 times.
On the other hand, Akismet can’t do anything about the spam that does sneak through. That is what nofollow is for: so that engines don’t do anything with spam that has already been published.
Wordpress and Wikipedia applying nofollow to every link is just reactionary and silly. That is not nofollow’s fault.
(Note I’m not particularly a fan of nofollow, but the level of misconception around it is getting ridiculous.)
Su said this on March 2, 2007 5:50 am
Su, maybe you should read the Official Google Blog on preventing comment spam.
Franky said this on March 2, 2007 5:55 am
And what? At best that post reveals a misunderstanding or bad phrasing on the part of its particular authors(“and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it,” not to mention the title), but this wasn’t just Google’s idea. At worst, it reveals a ridiculous degree of optimism; let’s face it: nothing short of worldwide legislation and enforcement is going to make spamming attempts stop.
There is absolutely nothing about nofollow that stops spam from actually ocurring, which is somehow what people seem to expect. In fact, that would nullify the existence of nofollow; the spam has to get through in the first place for this to even be an issue. (“and [God] promptly vanishes in a puff of logic”)
They also seem to expect that nofollow will make Google disappear spammer’s sites as a consequence, about which Google themselves can’t be consistent: Adam Lasnik in December said, they were crawled for discovery by not link weight, and Cutts in July suggested nofollow’d links don’t get crawled at all.
Beyond prevention or crawling, though, the ultimate point is to prevent those links from getting any weight; some people have referred to it as “nolinkjuice” instead, which is more accurate. It’s not a spam prevention measure, nor can it be by definition. This is about the same as people not understanding that OpenID is not a trust system.
Su said this on March 2, 2007 6:42 am
Oops.
Here’s the Cutts link from July.
Su said this on March 2, 2007 6:45 am
Of course nothing will kill spam. And there will always be new forms of spam.
But one could, admittedly arguably, say that the purpose of nofollow long term was to kill spam. Trying to keep spam out of SERPs, and out of email, is trying to kill it or am I too stupid? Trying to prevent violence is trying to kill it in its origins or? Yadda yadda.
Akismet doesn’t try to kill spam either in your reasoning. It tries spam not to become visible. But the Akismet Zeitgeist show how much spammers care about Akismet.
Point is, we can argue, but in the end we both agree IMHO.
I actively use nofollow, I even nofollow Google SERPs, but on my blogs, I have a dofollow policy for comments. I use anti-spam plugins and monitor published comments. Sometimes even delete comment author links.
And nofollow surely isn’t dead. No follow has a reason to be there. But it’s not what the echo chamber proclaims to be the reason.
Franky said this on March 2, 2007 6:55 am
[...] Jack of All Blogs [...]
Is rel=nofollow Dead? » The J Spot said this on March 5, 2007 5:31 pm
[...] Right on the heels of the nofollow issue we discover that one of the more popular sites lately that have the best link juice has learned to become picky with the sites it links to. Sure, Wikipedia is quite generous in linking to external sites—especially since the user-contributed encyclopedia relies on verifiable external sources. However, it turns out that Wikipedia has been favoring some sites and giving them the full strength of their linklove, while others get only a link with the nofollow tag attached. [...]
Wikipedia is Unfair » Jack Of All Blogs said this on April 30, 2007 5:26 am
[...] In one of John’s evil SEO trick posts, he says one good way to encourage people to leave comments on your blog is by displaying the top comment authors on your home page. This way they get a link from your front page, and with WordPress this is usually not dumbed down by rel=nofollow (something previously discussed here on JOAB). [...]
Jack Of All Blogs → Blog Archive » Too Much SEO and Everything is Going to Suck said this on June 20, 2007 4:28 pm
Nofollow was never meant to stop spam, it was meant to stop the PR juice flow from one site to another. If you really want to stop spam, then there are 2 major things you can do. The first one, each poster should be checked with the “type in the numbers” thingie, which will prevent from automated postings. Then, each blogger should manually clean his/her own blog (that’s common sense, if one is blogging). Congratulations for your clean blog, and how come you manage to have a spamless blog?
dvr said this on August 16, 2007 6:36 pm
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lokimikoj said this on September 22, 2007 10:47 am