Ok, so months on from the fanfare of Google’s rel=nofollow - does anyone still believe it did anything other than fix PageRanktm?!
The much lauded rel=nofollow tag, was originally aimed at
preventing comment spam, by reducing pagerank entries for ‘comment spam’, however in reality it has actually done little more than marginally stablised google’s PageRank system.
Over use of the tag (indeed you would be amazed just where rel=nofollow crops up needlessly) has in my opinion has trashed the inter-blog linking that had been very successfully fostered for the years leading up to google dropping the wrong kind of ‘iron’ on the problem.
Some, perhaps innocently enough, would argue the following:
“.. but most blogs link to each other via ‘link lists’, right
- so what’s the beef?”
My beef is that when one searches for specific content, (particularly where blogs are concerned), one was once able to follow a blog entry and associated thoughts via comments. This created a mini ‘link list’ of searchable, related material - just like Technorati has done with it’s searchable ‘tags’ system. Needless use of nofollow has meant such rich content and linkage has been reduced or rendered impotent.
A spammer’s job is to increase click through and site hit counts for their chosen affiliates and customers. How they get that increase is irrelevant. If said spammers can make use of comments of well frequented blogs, then all the better.
Comment spam has never been about Google, or any other search provider - it has been about raw visitor click through. Don’t believe me? It’s the same deal exists for the Adsense program as an example.
My belief is that rel=nofollow should be removed from blogs - to be replaced by basic anti-spam methods. Even a simple word-list is enough to prevent a high proportion of comment spam. That, gentle readers, is the way forward - not chopping of the Internet at it’s collective knees through malformed linkage tags.
Since most folk dislike spam and thus remove it whenever found, surely that alone proves ‘nofollow’ is a pointless exercise. Where blog admins are not observant, or do not have anti-spam measures in place, then the spammer wins - whether or not the comment gets a google rank, is again irrelevant, it’s still in front of a perspective click-through audience, thus achieving the intended goal.
This site is proudly 100% ‘nofollow’ free. Who wants to ‘reboot’ the linkverse with me?
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of rants.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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Jul 18th, 2005 at 7:33 am
I think Wp should have badbehavior bundled with it, because it not only helps with spam but also bandwidth from these evil spammers.
I dont think spamkarma should be bundled though as that still seems a tad over-zealous on occasions.
Jul 18th, 2005 at 7:58 am
..indeed - both sensible options.
The nofollow tag seems to be akin to an ‘ambulance at the bottom of the cliff’, pretty much too little, to late.
Jul 18th, 2005 at 9:03 am
yeah, I knew nofollow was a wrongun from the start.
Jul 18th, 2005 at 11:18 am
.. nofollow was never designed to fix comment spam - it was designed to fix googles pagerank mess, under the smoke screen of spam prevention.
When you actually go back and read some of the posts evangelising nofollow, anyone would think it was the second coming of Cthulu.