Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Ruining ‘nofollow’ With Abuse
I see recently that Sphinn has decided to take a stricter line on the use of nofollow. Links to submitted articles will be nofollow until they go hot. Sphinn are the latest, but they’re far from the only site to abuse nofollow. Like many sites they are trying to use nofollow to massage search engine figures and maintain a false value for links on their site.
nofollow is a reaction to link spam. It’s a direct reaction to the greater interactivity of the internet. From the moment that users could comment on web pages that weren’t their own - whether on blogs or other social media sites - spammers found a new outlet.
The basic overview
Comments and interactive sections on large sites were a really good spam. Not only did they get their crap links viewed by a lot of people, but search engines also gave those links value. If Google found link spam on a highly regarded page, then it’d equally consider the spam page itself to have value because of that link.
So Google introduced the rel=”nofollow” addition to HTML link coding. Pretty simple concept, if Google sees this in the HTML code it won’t see that outgoing link as important. It won’t give the target link credit for being linked to.
Problem solved. Just ensure that nofollow is incorporated into links that are submitted as part of site interactivity, and you’re fine. The spam links then become worthless in terms of gaining search engine credence, so there’s no spamming.
Yeah right
Frankly spammers don’t care. Spam by its nature is hardly the most considered of approaches anyway. There have been increasingly advanced email spam blockers over the years and most email spam is ignored by human users. But that’s hardly led to a noticeable reduction of spam email. So why should measures to reduce the impact of link spam actually lead to a reduction in the amount of spam?
So nofollow doesn’t stop spam. But it still reduces the impact that spam can have on search engine figures, which is a good thing. It makes Google results more accurate, and people can find what they’re looking for.
And then people got selfish
nofollow lets you have control over the value of your outgoing links. And so now we see sites using nofollow universally, or we see submission sites such as Sphinn making it the default on all new links. That’s selfish.
The majority of outgoing links are adding value to a site. They’re relevant to an article, they help to make a point, they create relationships with other sites. For a submission site like Sphinn or Mixx effectively their only value is as a forum for good quality outgoing links.
So adding nofollow is like a slap in the face for all those links out there that directly add value to the site in question. If a link is not spam, and is relevant and worthwhile to your site, it demands to have the Nnofollow removed.
For many sites there isn’t even a genuine motivation to have nofollow in blog comments or similar - previously the most open to attack to spammers. It doesn’t discourage spam attacks in any case. But there are also numerous applications out there which deal with spam effectively in any case - Askimet for WordPress is a good example.
The only reason why I would add nofollow to this site is if I had no other way to stop spam. I do, so I’m confident that the outgoing links have value. Therefore I used the NoFollow Free plugin to ensure that links are followed.
Google will make it redundant
Google introduced nofollow because link spam was impacting on the accuracy of its results. Spam was using technology workarounds to give a false impression of the internet map. It’s not that it was spam per se, it was that it wasn’t a true reflection. Google hates that.
But now a wider adoption of nofollow is being used to massage search results. It’s being used to do exactly what it was introduced to stop - impact on the accuracy of web searches, create a false reflection of the internet map. As I said, Google hates that.
So not only is the (moral, at least) abuse of nofollow counterproductive in terms of general web development, it’s also likely to make Google rethink the whole thing. Google have always reacted against attempts to massage the search enging results, and that is exactly what extensive use of nofollow does.
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