There has been a great fuzz lately about the Nofollow attribute on links and I think every publisher of new media (bloggers and alike) should take a stand either against or in favor of this discussion.
I took mine and I have disabled nofollow on this blog, but before I get on the discussion, let me first overview what the nofollow atribute is.
In principle, when you put a link to a page, you are endorsing the site and its content. By this, Google assumes you like that page and counts “a vote” in favor of that page. Many other factors interfere, but simply put, the more links a site has, the more important Google thinks it is and better ranks it on searches.
The nofollow attribute is an attribute that might be put on a link to tell google NOT to follow a link when indexing the page. That means that, even having a link to the site/page, you explicitly says: I do NOT endorse that content and I do NOT vote on it to be better ranked.
The purpose of this attribute is, mainly, fight spam. By enabling nofollow on the links of comments on a blog, you, theoretically, discourage spammers of leaving spam comments on your site, because they’ll get nothing from it.
While te intention is very beautiful, some side discussion arises from it, and I think this (big) side discussion is mainly to answer two questions:
- Does nofollow Really fight spam?
- Don’t real commenters deserve the backlinks for their legitimate comments?
Does nofollow Really fight spam?
In my opinion seems that the amount of spam over the net, both through email and comment spam is growing fast and steady and this can be seen with the naked eye, but is endorsed by statistics even with many important resources, like Wordpress and Wikipedia using nofollow by default.
Even if one can argue that the growth of spam would be even greater, one thing is for sure: nofollow is not stopping spam.
Lorelle VanFossen, among many others, think that nofollow will not work.
Don’t real commenters deserve the backlinks for their legitimate comments?
The second question is more subjective and intrinsically more complicated.
For many of us, that do our jobs and write blogs out of passion, it would be nice to be able to just dedicate ourselves to produce content and have google and other search engines able to rank sites on the net according to the importance we give them as humans, and not through the tricks that some are more able to perform than others, even when their ability to build interesting sites is not equally good.
Still, this is just a dream by now. We have a long way to get closer to this ideal situation and, in the meanwhile, I think every publisher of new media should now this tricks a little and take a conscious stand on either side.
In my opinion, in order to get closer to this (so far) ideal situation we must treat links and comments as they should be interpreted and I totally agree with Lorelle that comments and comment links should be treated normally.
Commenters should be treated as first class citizens, instead of being penalized for the misbehavior of spammers. Spam control should reside somewhere else, like in Akismet spam fighter, and not put as an obstacle between and your readers/commenters.
To me, it seems a little controversial to allow a link that can be followed by human visitors but not for search engines when, ideally, the importance for humans should be the same as for search engines.
In my point of view, if a comment (either in a moderated or unmoderated blog) is present in a blog is because, in a way, you endorse the right to an opinion of the comenter, even when you don’t agree with it, and the link she may leave is a way to find more about the author for those who are interested in her.
That is why, I decided to turn off nofollow on this blog, I know this will bring more spam that I will have to handle, and also more irrelevant comments that I’ll have to delete, they have already started.
To help me with this, I have enabled moderation. This will give me more work, of course, but I believe that is the honest thing to do.
Do you agree? Do you believe in nofollow?
Guilherme
is a Web Designer focused on web standards and the web ahead of us.
13 Comments
After some time has gone by, please post how going dofollow has affected both traffic and comments.
Thanks
@mlankton - Ok, I will! :-)
Great post, I totally agree. Please update on this, have you seen a huge increase in spam?
@tap -
Actually, I haven’t seen much more spam than the usual, but I also haven’t seen a big increase on valid comments as well.
It is true that my main motivation was to reward my commenters, but I’d also be glad to see more (legit) comments.
I think rewarding valid comments is definitely a good idea. Whether you use nofollow or not, you will get spammed. Lots of spammers or looking not only for generating links, but just putting tons of links out there to get traffic.
@Deceth -
I definetely agree with you. In my opinion there is only one ultimate solution to end spam: Manual moderation.
I know this sounds utopia when you think at enterpreneur probloggers with many blogs to take care: automation is needed. It is easier for an modest authority blogger like me.
Anyway, I think if one can afford to that, one should.
Okay, this makes sense. I was following the conversation on AuthorityBlogger (which is how I found your blog).
I had been reading about the so-called dofollow movement, and I can see the merit of it.
I wonder if the day is not far off when search engine traffic is dwarfed by social networking?
Cheers,
Mitch
@Mitchell Allen - Hi Mitchell, welcome to our discussion.
That would be like returning to the old times of paper publishing, but with the reach of internet for your content. Sounds interesting :-)
I have recently activated a Link Love plugin that removes the “nofollow” tag after x number of comments. That way, I am sure that the particular commentator is not only a passer-by but is somebody who contributes to the discussions on my blog. And I save a lot of time moderating comments! :)
@pelf -
Hi Pelf,
Before turning off nofollow on this site I have considered several options and the linklove plugin was one of these.
I turned it down because of two reasons:
Passer-by commenters that have made relevant comments deserve a link as much as those who comment every post, everyone will have one link for each comment, so still it is fair with habitual commenters.
Once a bot is faster than a human to leave a comment, force them to put a certain number won’t stop them from spanning me, they would just do it more. I already had spam comments before the do-follow option so, nofollow doesn’t seem to stop them buy any measure.
I decided to moderate comments because as I put a lot of time and effort to write the posts, I thought it would be a fair investment to spend a little more and don’t allow people (and bots, of course :-) to ruin that up.
Not everyone can do it, of course. Sometimes the effort is just too big, but it has worked for me.
The only problem with your article is that NoFollow has absolutely nothing to do with fighting SPAM. Google wants you to use it to fight ad-filled sites from gaming their search algos, thereby getting higher results.
@Jim - Thanks for the correction.
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