rel=”nofollow” – the debacle.
Firstly, a quick explanation. The rel=”nofollow” tag was agreed upon to prevent comment SPAM. Basically, people were using robots to add comments to blogs & guestbooks merely to get a backlink. This is simply a means to try and manipulate the search engine algorythms and gain higher search engine position. I agree that that’s a bad thing. Blogger (as an example) now adds the rel=”nofollow” tag to any links a comment has. The upshot is that when Googlebot spiders a blog, it ignores (or, to be precise does not “follow”) any links in comments.
I don’t agree with the rel=”nofollow” tag as an answer to the problem. It’s a shotgun approach that has only introduced more problems. The main reasons I don’t like it is that 1) it won’t stop comment SPAM and 2) it’s open for outrageous abuse.
The core of the issue is blogs (or gusetbooks) with high PR (Google pagerank) were tagetted by spammers as a great place to have a link from. The rel=”nofollow” tag allows people to not have to moderate comments on their blogs/guestbooks safe in the knowledge that they are never going to provide a “worthwhile” backlink to any visiting spambots.
This is a bunch of crap. If Google is serious about comment SPAM they should de-index the unmoderated blogs & guestbooks. If you aren’t reading (and therefore moderating) the comments left on your blog, you don’t really need comments at all as they obviously don’t interest you.
On the sinister side, the rel=”nofollow” tag can be abused, and this is starting to happen. Wikipedia.org now applies the attribute to all outbound links. So, while it has millions of sites linking in to it, it (effectively) no longer links out to any sites. Thats a case of take and not give on a monumental scale. This tag is also being abused by directories. Directories should obviously provide a backlink to the site that has been submitted to them – the submitter has taken the time & effort to submit their website and the payback should be a backlink. They’ve provided the directory with keyword rich content after all, which is exactly what they want to gain better search engine placement.
To summarise, rel=”nofollow” is NOT the answer. The answer to the problem is to de-index sites that cannot be bothered to moderate the content that they link out to. Wikipedia being a fine example.
