"nofollow" Fallout
Google recently announced support for a new link tag: rel=”nofollow”. When Google indexes your site, any links that are tagged with nofollow don’t receive a PageRank boost from your link. This is intended to reduce the incentive for comment spammers.
Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon: Six Apart has implemented nofollow for Moveable Type & TypePad; and the latest CVS for Wordpress already includes nofollow despite a raging debate on the hacker’s list about it’s use.
I don’t think nofollow is going to save interactive sites from comment spam. It’s a nice gesture but it really doesn’t address the root cause of spam. Think about the following:
- E-mail doesn’t give spammers the equivalent of a PageRank boost, so why is your inbox so full of spam?
- How long does it take for search engines to index new content on your site?
- Would you rather have spam displayed on your site with nofollow tags or see no spam at all?
The PageRank factor is really minimal in terms of comment spam: by the time the site is indexed, the offending comment has probably been deleted. And if the comment is on an unmanaged site then the weight given to that link will be miniscule anyway. Spammers operate on the same basis as direct mailings: you send out a huge amount of advertising in the hopes that you can convert a tiny fraction into sales. Only in the case of electronic spam, the cost to send out tons of “flyers” is almost nothing. All they need is a handful of people to click on their link and the thousands of comment spams have been worth it, PageRank be damned.
Exposure is really what the spammer needs, which is why you receive so many e-mails advertising cheap pharmaceuticals and other such offers. Someone out there has to be clicking on those links. To truly stop spam comments, you need to prevent the comment in the first place. This is a very tough challenge without easy solutions (short of disabling comments). Which is exactly the reason that when something easy and promising like nofollow comes along, people jump to implement it and announce that all our problems have been solved.
So if it doesn’t do anything, why all the fuss? Because it hurts legitimate commenters who add to a discussion - the whole reason that interactive sites are so popular. These are the “little guys”, for whom a tiny amount of PageRank means quite a lot. They’re not trying to be #1 on Google for pharmaceuticals, they just want to be found by people with similar interests.
Matt Mullenweg’s response to nofollow in WordPress is very disappointing. It’s been implemented unilaterally, despite legitimate concerns from the development community that supports WP. His response is that nofollow can be disabled by creating a custom plug-in - nevermind that it was coded in such a way that makes it difficult to change with a plug-in (I’ve hacked it out completely). A more sensible approach would be to implement nofollow as a plug-in that’s been enabled by default; much easier to disable or modify it this way.
The great "nofollow" debate continues... In the meantime, here's a neat image I found on Flickr.
Unfortunately their website (nonofollow.net) is wiki-based and has recently been vandalized by a nofollow die-hard. Which boggles the mind, really.
jerome — 23-Jan-2005 22:36If I understand this correctly the nofollow thing is hardcoded into Wordpress and can only be disabled with a plugin? That's really insane. Why did they do that? I myself in fact don't even want any nofollow tag in posted links. I just make sure no spam gets on my pages which is why I don't need nofollow.
Thank god you can just switch it on or off at will in Pivot.
Marco — 17-Feb-2005 05:43Yes, that's exactly what they did. And it's not a trivial plug-in to create either. Their rationale: they don't want novice users to be able to switch off "nofollow". I have no problems with people tagging links howsoever they choose, but to say that nofollow is mandatory to prevent comment spam, that's simply not true. I'm glad that other platforms like Pivot haven't jumped on the bandwagon.
Nice work on your tags plugin, by the way.
jerome — 17-Feb-2005 10:52That's really crappy. I for one actually WANT to switch it off... It's already shown that it has ZERO effect on the amount of spammers hammering on my poor server. Hundreds of referrer spammers and a fair amount of comment-spamming attempts are being blocked on my site every day. It's still quiet on the trackbacks though. I wonder for how long. Google should really come up with something better than this nofollow thing. I actually wrote them an email about it but didn't get anything back unfortunately.
Thanks for the compliment on my tags thingy :)
Marco — 17-Feb-2005 11:00Comment and trackback spam are just another form of junk mail. The problem is much larger than the web and cannot be solved with technology alone. We need to make a big shift from our "place your ad here" culture to remove the drive that causes people to flood us with advertising.
I think that nofollow was really intended to help Google's search results become more relevant. They put a comment spam spin on it to try to appease the flood of complaints from webloggers.
jerome — 17-Feb-2005 12:08[…] nofollow" Agenda WordPress 1.5 Plugin - Strip “nofollow” tag from comment URLs "nofollow" Fallout To "nofollow" or not that is the question Google’s […]
Simple Thoughts » Blog Archive » NoFollow Coverage — 18-Mar-2005 07:44You can use my plugin to disable “nofollow” from your comments in a WordPress 1.5 blog.
I am also covering articles on nofollow and included this link.
Angsuman Chakraborty — 18-Mar-2005 07:47Very nice. You're site is very helpful. when Table Lose Round Kill: http://www.euronews.net/ , Faithful Grass is always Profound Gnome Roll Girl is very good Circle , Coolblooded is feature of International Grass Play Destroy Loose - that is all that Round is capable of
Daniel Williams — 29-Nov-2005 13:49You can try also the DoFollow plugin for WordPress
mutui — 17-Dec-2005 12:05the last four comments really cracked me up… look at the little leeches posting their muck after this site has aged. this is why no follow tags are still valid, altho definitely not a perfect solution. moderator?
Barbara — 05-Dec-2006 13:16