Nofollow Is Completely Misused
August 13, 2008 – 1:53 pmNofollow was a stupid idea from the beginning, and I’m sure most webmasters would agree with that. It was intended to put a bandage on a gaping wound. Nofollow was invented in order to tell search engines “this link was probably spammed so don’t trust it.” It was meant to wipe out comment and forum spam. It hasn’t accomplished that task at all, and now he Nofollow tag has basically screwed up the flow of PageRank on the entire internet.
Many websites basically nofollow all external links now. Of course “PR hoarders” are nothing new in this world, but it means there really is no such thing anymore as a “freely given editorial link” that constitutes a “vote” for a website. I produce content every day on a number of subjects and am linked to quite often. Unfortunately, almost all of the links are now “nofollowed” even ones where my post is cited as the ‘only source’ for the creation of their story! Ha!
Let’s look at the original post for nofollow from 2005.
We encourage you to use the rel=”nofollow†attribute anywhere that users can add live links by themselves, including within comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. Comment areas receive the most attention, but securing every location where someone can add a link is the way to keep spammers at bay.
Now the definition of nofollow is expanding every day. Remarkably enough, even Google’s new Knoll project will employ nofollow on all external links. This is the same policy that’s now employed by basically all “authority” sites online. They are happy to have people link to them, but they won’t link back out to anyone, regardless of why the link was created in the first place.
Nofollow is now officially being misused by everyone online, and natural linking is largely a thing of the past. And what about comment spam and forum spam? Based on my daily job of removing it, it hasn’t gone anywhere.
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3 Responses to “Nofollow Is Completely Misused”
“nofollow” will be abused for the same reasons that paid links were “abused”. They result in economic value. Anything that has monetary value will get used. The trick is to devise systems that give a zero sum or positive sum game - “nofollow” is a predictably negative sum game; more people expend more effort after “nofollow”, than before, and the total effect of the benefits is less than it was before.
By Jeremy Chatfield on Aug 22, 2008
I recently blogged about this and started using the “nofollow reciprocity” wordpress plugin. It scans all external links in your blog, and if they go to an authority website which uses nofollow, like Wikipedia, then it gives a nofollow back to them. But small site and blog owners it doesn’t add the nofollow attribute. I think this will help smaller sites help each other by making all our link exchanges “dofollow”.
By NJ Seo Barry Wise on Aug 25, 2008
I started using the “dofollow” and “commentsluv” WP plugins on a new(ish) yoga blog to encourage participation, ergo traffic, which is where the money comes from. So far, spam hasn’t increased, but I will be keeping an eye on whether the comments contribute to the conversation or not.
Unfortunately, I just don’t think there are many SEO savvy yoga types out there, not sure that the traffic I’ll attract will be relevant to how I’ve monetized the site.
Hrmmm…
By David on Sep 19, 2008