Why you mostly should avoid nofollow

The: 24/03/2011 - AT: 1:54

Webmasters often tend to obsess about nofollow for the wrong reason, ever since google started recommending that all links be made nofollow.

Google recommends that links in blog comments should be made nofollow, using the rel attribute of HTML. Citing that it may reduce spam to the blog.

The only problem about that is: spam is usually not posted by people. All the spam that I've fought here on my blog, as well as on Brugbart after opening the commenting feature, has been automated. So what annoys me the most, is the fact that a silly little spammer pushed a botton somewhere from his parents basement.

About rel="nofollow"

Many people use the nofollow attribute on all external links, disregarding the quality of the links. They even use it on their ads, because they are scared that Google may tag them for selling links.

Selling links that pass pagerank is not always bad, given that its links to sites that you can actually recommend. If this isn't the case, then they should be nofollowed. Google has also made exceptions in this area before, but each case will likely be reviewed manually. After all, there is no way they can tell if you are selling links automatically.

Another case where it would be fine, is when linking to partners and contributers to your sites content, or whatever subject your site is about.

Blog comments and forum posts should always be dofollow links, its disrespectful to users to apply the nofollow attribute. Spam should be dealt with trough other means. Besides, spammers tend to post their crap anyway, so its not only disrespectful to users, its also ineffective at dealing with spam.

Automated spam

As long as there are rule breakers, there will always be some need for police. A lot of automated spam can be prevented by pattern matching, and ip block lists.

What we want, is to automate the deletion of as much automated spam as possible, which can easily be done using pattern matching rules.

Most spam software works by having a few fixed comments in place, which will be rotated. So its fairly easy to detect common spam attacks like these.

The limited amount of spam posted by users, should be dealt with by admins. Most links posted are not spam. Blogs tend to suffer more from spam than forums, but not more then you can delete it manually.

Comments: [1]

Author: BlueBoden

Poster: PaulZag

Date: 25/07/2011 - 0:17

I do obsess about nofollow. Not to the point checking to see before I comment, but definitely on my own blogs.

The problem with pattern matching is it is not effective enough. On older blogs I manage (but don't write for) it is not unusual to get 30-50 spam comments per day versus one good comment per week.

Many of those blogs used to be dofollow, but I've surrendered the fight and gone nofollow.

On blogs that have always been nofollow, I still get 100:1 spam ratio, and all of it is script kiddies from mommy's basement. Why do they spam a marriage celebrant's nofollow blog?

I like the idea of nofollow for 14 days then dofollow if the comment is allowed to stand. I use some nice tools that catch 99.99% of spam so I'd like to reward the commentator.