The Insidious Nofollow Tag: An SEO Rant
I’m normally a positive, upbeat kind of guy, and as someone who’s been writing professionally since the days of disco, rarely at a loss for words. Yet mention the “nofollow” tag, and that all changes. I, like many other many other web marketing professionals, am left sputtering with a mix of disgust and rage, fumbling for an adjective that conveys sufficient contempt: despicable, vile, loathsome, abhorrent, abominable, wretched, odious, detestable, downright evil.
The nofollow tag was misguidedly inflicted upon the online world by Google in 2005. According to Wikipedia (among the worst nofollow offenders), “The nofollow HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Blog readers and bloggers were well aware of the immense problem. Just like any other type of spam affects its community, comment spam affected the entire blogging community, so in early 2005 (Google and Blogger engineers) designed the attribute to address the problem and the nofollow attribute was born.”
Though the originators of WordPress have developed a far more elegant and inoffensive solution to the comment spam problem with Akismet, the execrable nofollow tag remains with us, like a cancer impervious to drugs or radiation.
The justification for the continued use of this repugnant scrap of code is to prevent passing link juice from listings on directory and social bookmarking sites to spammy or other objectionable content. But, to be charitable, the nofollow tag is to the world of web links what “let’s just be friends” is to romantic relationships. It’s a way for site owners to say: “I’m happy to use your content to build my traffic, but not to reciprocate. I don’t want anyone to think we’re together.”
An alarming number of once-respectable social bookmarking sites—Digg, delicious, Mister Wong, Reddit, Mixx, Bibsonomy, Jumptags, Faves, Yahoo! Buzz, Simpy—have now instituted dastardly nofollow tags. It’s easy to determine if your favorite site should now become an ex-favorite, just “view source” in your browser and search for rel=”nofollow.” If it’s there for any reason other than Pagerank sculpting (e.g. nofollowing pages like “Contact Us”), move along. If you’re trying to promote your own content, it won’t work. If you are trying to promote some else’s, you won’t help them much.
Hey, here’s a novel idea: if someone is using your blog, social media site or directory to link to spam, porn, hate speech, discount online pharmaceuticals, miracle weight loss nonsense, or work-at-home scams—DELETE THE LINK. Why is okay to have such crap listed on your site, regardless of whether or not you’re passing link juice?
In fairness, this pernicious string of characters once served a purpose, as a less-than-ideal solution to a serious problem. But today, Akismet solves the link spam problem on blogs. The community can be used to solve the problem on social bookmarking sites. A little bit of old-fashioned work can deal with issue on directory sites.
I’m not alone on this. It’s time to demand better, to rid the world of the reprehensible, insidious nofollow tag once and for all. Ideally, Google should announce it’s no longer recognizing the tag. Absent that, site owners should boycott it. And if they don’t, users should walk.
Note: This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in October 2009. But it all remains true.
Tags: Akismet, Blogger, David Leonhardt, dofollow, Google, insidious nofollow tag, link juice, link spam, NetLingo, SEO rant, The Minority Report, web marketing, Wikipedia, WordPress
6 Responses
Michael Martinez
You make the following very ironic comment:
“f it’s there for any reason other than Pagerank sculpting (e.g. nofollowing pages like “Contact Us”), move along.”
People should not be attempting sculpt PageRank. Google declared last year that attempts at PageRank sculpting only resulted in sites delisting their own valuable content. There is absolutely no credible SEO reason for anyone to attempt to sculpt PageRank.
NOFOLLOW was implemented because of the abuse by blackhat SEO link spammers, who use scripts to hammer blogs and forums with bogus registrations and messages that are intended to either compromise Websites or drop promotional links in them.
It’s virtually impossible to moderate that volume of spam once your blog or forum is added to the various “dofollow” lists that are circulated. At least NOFOLLOWing comment links by default protects your site from being penalized by Google (a policy they implemented in November of last year).
Google has certainly been gradually granting itself police powers over the Web. Their policy is atrocious but people who depend on Google visibility need to pay attention to Google’s guidelines and policies.
Eric Goldman
Couldn’t agree me more with the sentiment of this post. Turns out, Google must have been listening to you, me and all the others who’ve complained about it. Apparently they have changed the rules again, this time to make it better to use follow links, than no-follows. In other words, the world has returned to an honest linking strategy. At last!
webbiqu1
Thanks for the thoughtful comments Michael. I agree that trying to use nofollow for Pagerank sculpting is a suspect practice, and don’t do it for my own clients, but I still see many sites attempting this and many SEO bloggers still advising use of this tactic. As I note in my post, nofollow had a purpose when it was first implemented, but there are better ways to block comment link spam now and nofollow has outlived its usefulness. Nofollowing comments disincentivises legitimate comments, needlessly reducing the interactivity of blogs. I disagree that it’s impossible to moderate blog comment spam; as I note, tools like Akismet have become effective at filtering out the vast majority of such spam. I’ve never heard that Google penalizes blogs for dofollowing comments, but if your information is accurate, then Google really is “doing evil,” contrary to its mantra. I’m not sure how this can be accomplished, but I hope this evil tag can eventually be banished from existence.
webbiqu1
Hi Eric, I had not heard that. Seems you and Michael are providing contrary opinions on this. Do you have a link to an authoritative source to back this up? I hope you are correct!
Michael Martinez
The fact many SEO bloggers say that PageRank sculpting works doesn’t mean anything. Most SEO bloggers are just repeating crap they read on other Websites, either because they are reporting the latest buzz or because they are trying to establish a reputation for themselves by writing about SEO and really don’t know enough (or feel confident enough in their own experiences) to share something new.
I’m well aware of Akismet but WordPress is not the only blogging platform out there. Just as people should not feel compelled to use nofollow on comment links, nor should they feel compelled to use any one blogging platform.
And Akismet is only as good as the people who use it. Some comment spammers do a very good job of getting past the human filtering.
Google’s war on comment spam has passed through some controversial phases. It’s also possible that people in the SEO community (including me) have overinterpreted a stern warning Google published about comment spam last Fall. However, allowing spammy links in blog comments that point to malware or other really bad sites might get a site penalized by Google’s “bad neighborhood” filter. That is the real reason why I advocate the use of “nofollow” in comment links.
Gabriela Shimkus
i am a newbie in Search Engine Optimization but i think that the submission of articles in article directories is one of the best ways to gain backlinks. |