The nofollow tag revisited

I just came across this post from Cristian Mezei's blog (http://www.seopedia.org/personal/remove-nofollow-from-wordpress-comments/):

13 July, 2006
Remove nofollow from Wordpress comments
Starting from today, website links of all the owners of comments made in my blog don’t have the nofollow attribute anymore. Links within comments, still have the nofollow attribute.

I thought this through and I see it as fit. I actually don’t approve any spam comment, unless a human has got something to say (spam gets blocked), so why not reward my visitors with at least a crawlable link?

If anyone wants to use this plugin it’s easy as 1-2-3.

Just download remove-nofollow.zip. Inside the archive you will find remove_follow.php. Upload this file in wp-content/plugins and then activate the plugin in the Plugins section of the Wordpress admin.


In a more recent post (http://www.seopedia.org/internet-marketing-and-seo/so-who-removed-nofollow-from-their-comments/), Cristian says this:

26 September, 2006
So who removed nofollow from their comments?

Lately, I am seeing a lot of blogs from the big boys (like Jeremy Zawodny or Jim Boykin) in our industry, without the nofollow on any of the links in the comments.

As far as I can see, Jeremy doesn’t allow links in the commenters name field, but any other links in the comments, are crawlable and countable links, like in this or this posts.

Moreover, Jim is apparently using some kind of module for this purpose, because I can see links without ANY nofollow in this post, with SOME nofollow’s in this post, and ONLY with nofollow in this post.

I mean you guys know, that I myself removed the nofollow from my comments some time ago (months). I just wanted to give something back to the community. Anyone can download the remove nofollow module I built (it’s very easy to install, just upload and activate) and can have the nofollow in the name/URL field without nofollow, but still keep the nofollow on any URL’s in the comment itself.

I mean these two guys (Jeremy is like Yahoo!’s MySQL geek and Jim is the CEO of Webuildpages, a well known Internet marketing company) certainly know what nofollow is, what can it do for them and stuff like that. If they have disabled the nofollow on their comments, that makes me (us) wonder right?

I had some views on nofollow in the past. What’s your opinion ? Is the nofollow attribute really important anymore ? Is it preventing spam or not?

My own view is that there was never any evidence that this prevented spam. The only people that benefitted from it would have been possibly Google, and maybe other search engine spiders. Spammers kept doing what they always do. They fill up our inboxes knowing that 99.9% of their emails will go directly to trash. They fill up wordpress comments knowing that filters like Akismet will intercept 99.9% of their automatic comment posts. They post in forums knowing that almost as soon as they do they will be banned and their posts deleted. Does anyone really believe that the possibility that a blog or forum will be using nofollow will deter them?

My Blog spam didnt reduce... So I dont think it deterred anyone.

nofollow it's too esoteric to actually deter anything. Besides I don't believe is it's function. For me it's more about preventing black/grey hat SEO exploitation of your site. "You want to post a link to your site? fine, it will be human accesible but not machine accesible", seems like a fine compromise to me to offer your users.

Spam will never be deterred by a compromise that's for sure. Spam only get's deterred by agressive action, nuclear is preferable.

"You want to post a link to your site? fine, it will be human accesible but not machine accesible", seems like a fine compromise to me to offer your users.I suspect the spamsters will settle for the human traffic. Search engine visible link or not, their business is about cheap exposure however they can get it.

Maybe the answer lies in somehow establishing a clear message that quality contextual advertising is OK as long as the advertiser is contributing real value to the board - quality posts and articles. Of course - that wouldn't work for blogs. Maybe an advantage for forums where members can establish their own personality in a series.

It's the robot posters and hackers :mad: but then, that's a war and why I bought vB. It seems to give the best tools.

Sure, but my point is that rel="nofollow" was never meant to deal with spam.

I agree, Hell3. It was meant to try to preserve the integrity of PageRank. And it doesn't work for that purpose either.

That I can agree myself.

I agree, Hell3. It was meant to try to preserve the integrity of PageRank. And it doesn't work for that purpose either.

So, at the risk of seeming thick, or wandering off-topic (I confess I'm a newb to the subtleties of SEO and nofollow), the purpose of nofollow is to help the search engines do a better job of Pageranking?

I get the concept of using nofollow so that I don't end up with password, register or access denied as top keywords for my site.

I understand the temptation to use nofollow to "help" Google do its job i.r.o. Pagerank, but surely at the end of the day that's Google's problem - They're the one under pressure to deliver relevant returns on search strings and they need to sort out their algorithm accordingly.

So few website publishers spend time on an issue like using nofollow - period. The efforts of a few to use this to help Pagerank are surely a drop in the ocean.

Or am I way off base.

In the words of Matt Cutts in a recent interview (http://battellemedia.com/archives/002917.php):

When savvy people think about Google, they think about algorithms, and algorithms are an important part of Google. But algorithms aren't magic; they don't leap fully-formed from computers like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus. Algorithms are written by people. People have to decide the starting points and inputs to algorithms. And quite often, those inputs are based on human contributions in some way.


The simplest example is that hyperlinks on the web are created by people. A passable rule of thumb is that for every page on the web, there are 10 hyperlinks, and all those billions of links are part of the material that modern search engines use to measure reputation. As you mention, Google News ranks based on which stories human editors around the web choose to highlight. Most of the successful web companies benefit from human input, from eBay's trust ratings to Amazon's product reviews and usage data. Or take Netflix's star ratings. This past week I watched Brick and Boondock Saints, and I'm pretty sure that L4yer cake and Hotel Rwanda are going to be good, because all those DVDs have 4+ stars. Those star ratings are done by people, and they converge to pretty trustworthy values after only a few votes.

So I think too many people get hung up on "Google having algorithms." They miss the larger picture, which (to me) is to pursue approaches that are scalable and robust, even if that implies a human side. There's nothing inherently wrong with using contributions from people--you just have to bear in mind the limitations of that data. For example, the three companies I mentioned above have to consider the malicious effect that money can have in their human systems. Netflix doesn't have to worry much (who wants to spam a DVD rating?), while eBay probably spends a lot more time thinking about how to make their trust ratings accurate and fair.

....

Google does consider it a violation of our quality guidelines to sell links that affect search engines. If someone wanted to sell links purely for visitors, there are a myriad number of ways to do it that don't affect search engines. You could have paid links do an internal redirect, and then block that redirecting page in robots.txt. You could add the rel="nofollow" attribute to a link, which tells search engines that you can't or don't want to vouch for the destination of a link. The W3C decided to add a "INDEX, NOFOLLOW" meta tag to their sponsor page, which has the benefits that the sponsor page can show up in search engines and that users receive nice static links that they can click on, but search engines are not affected by the outlinks on that page.

And THAT was the reason Google introduced nofollow tags - not to help webmasters but to try to enlist the assistance of webmasters in helping them.

Thanks minstrel. I'm not trying to be argumentative - more like unashamedly picking your brains on what I'm finding an increasingly interesting subject.

Up 'till now I've relied on the maxim "focus on content" which worked just fine for me with normal Frontpage generated sites. However, now having a vB powered site and in searching how to improve presentation of content, I've discovered SEO is an issue. It really struck home when I saw vBulletin, password and register coming up as significant keywords for my site.

I'm probably ill equipped to carry on a debate about SEO specifically, but I do have some strength in issues of strategy and the client/servant relationship. (Most people use the word business instead of servant).
When savvy people think about Google, they think about algorithms, and algorithms are an important part of Google. But algorithms aren't magic; they don't leap fully-formed from computers like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus. Algorithms are written by people. People have to decide the starting points and inputs to algorithms. And quite often, those inputs are based on human contributions in some way.This clearly states the challenge - for Google and others who hope to follow their strategy. Google got ahead of the game by writing an algorithm (essentially automating) that was in line with and took advantage of human usage of the internet at the time. Google's human input is defining the elements and relationships of that algorithm. And it seems many would be Google competitors believe the key to their success is to write a better algorithm.

The strategy relies entirely on algorithm interpretation of what comes in. By contrast MSN has a staffer checking who's knocking on the door before they let you in. And judging by what I'm reading lately, sentiment suggest that MSN is doing a better job than Google right now - despite the probability of a less sophisticated algorithm than Google's.
There's nothing inherently wrong with using contributions from people--you just have to bear in mind the limitations of that data. For example, the three companies I mentioned above have to consider the malicious effect that money can have in their human systems. Netflix doesn't have to worry much (who wants to spam a DVD rating?), while eBay probably spends a lot more time thinking about how to make their trust ratings accurate and fair.The key to me is that you can't solve "the malicious effect" by trying to fix the human behaviour that is essentially out of your control. You need to understand it better, analyse it better and get your humans on staff to amend the algorithm and methods in line with current use and practices.

Placing any strategic dependence on non-staffers changing their ways to conform with Google needs is inviting disaster. It's the tail wagging the dog.

Which is why I'm surprised that /nofollow has an effect on PageRank i.r.o. scoring on links out.

I definitely need to study up more on this - I was aware that links to "a bad part of town" affected reputation. But I thought this was more by subject matter category than PageRank.

I'm guessing that links out to lower PageRanked pages doesn't help either?

I didn't interpret your post as argumentative, Dave.

I'm guessing that links out to lower PageRanked pages doesn't help either?
Outgoing links for the most part do not affect your PageRank per se at all - it just has a potential effect on the PR of the pages those outgoing links point to.

However, PageRank is "only one of more than 100 factors" determining Google ranking (as they state on their webmaster guidelines pages) so where you link to may in some cases negatively affect your ranking, or may even result in a penalty. The other thing that probably comes into play is that the "theme" of your site is dependent on page content as well as links, so to avoid diluting the theme of your site it is probably wise to limit the number of outgoing links that are 'off topic".

Thanks - most helpful.