Why NoFollow Links Suck
I had my first visit to Search Engine Journal today, and their excellent 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck.
NoFollow is an attribute you can add to any link on a website. Its usage tells search engines that the link is not endorsed by that site. As a result Google will not use the link in PageRank calculations.
The idea was to thwart the increase in blog spam and to prevent spammers gaining PageRank from a litter of links they’d left across the blogosphere.
For responsible bloggers, though, NoFollow means they get no credit for their comments and contributions to other blogs (which is a bit of a disincentive to leave a comment, really). But on the other hand, the less SEO-aware masses may let blogs go dormant or not bother checking their comments, therefore allowing spammers to amass links back to their sites with relative ease.
One of Loren’s points is that NoFollow is a mark of failure by the search engines to deal with the problem of blog spam, identify it and penalize it in the rankings:
No-follow is a poor search engine’s solution to conceal its own failure to rank websites appropriately. What’s next, No-linking?
Search engines should be able to develop a method of identifying and devaluing links to spam sites which were placed in blog comments. Why should everyone who posts in blog comments suffer from the actions of a greedy few spammers.
Which may be a valid point, but I still think it’s a good thing that Blogger, WordPress et all have NoFollow on by default. More savvy WordPress bloggers can disable NoFollow links with a plugin called DoFollow.
By the way, if you want to be able to tell what websites use NoFollow, grab the SEO for FireFox plugin. It has a feature that highlights NoFollow links in red (might be hard to read - I usually tone down the colour!). You’ll be surprised at how prevalent the NoFollow attribute is!
Oh, and here’s a few thoughts from Dougal Campbell on the implementation of NoFollow in WordPress.
February 16th, 2007 at 4:30 am
“By the way, if you want to be able to tell what websites use NoFollow, grab the SEO for FireFox plugin”
Thanks for the heads up on that plugin, I’ll give it a shot. I’m far more likely to comment on and participate in sites that do not use NoFollow.
Another site suggested a DoFollow badge — I rather like that idea. Or perhaps an Anti-NoFollow badge, which has to exist somewhere out there by now.
April 14th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Why Not Nofollow Links?…
Nofollow is a property that you can add to a link. It goes like this: <a href="http://leonti.us.to/" rel="nofollow">a nofollow link</a> (notice the rel=”nofollow” clause). Basically it tells search engines not to tak…