“nofollow” Still Considered Harmful
Jens Meiert, January 6, 2007 / August 21, 2007.
This entry is filed under Web Development.
Needs to be said again, as it will take some time until I write about this very site’s design considerations (which included a blink of an eye thinking about using nofollow): nofollow is crap.
The “No nofollow” website’s explanation of all the disadvantages of the unstandardized value nofollow of HTML’s rel attribute is pretty comprehensive – read it now, if you didn’t before, especially, when you run a system that hammers out nofollow rel attributes.
Put together, nofollow disrespects the very nature of the web and it disrespects users. And it’s not even successful at all, except its broad adaptation. We need to think about other ways to avoid spam. This way, it only benefits search engines, if anyone at all.
Interestingly, the entire nofollow thing reminds us of camera surveillance, doesn’t it? Everybody appears to think it helps against crime and terrorism, but it doesn’t.
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Comments
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On January 10, 17:16 CET, Robert Wellock said:
I’d have to agree the nofollow is a harmful implementation and serves little useful purpose.
After all, most spam is typically robot generated anyway and they couldn’t care a hoot whether or not they are dropping nonsense links on a website with that attribute or not.
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On January 23, 16:39 CET, Jon Henshaw said:
rel=”nofollow” is free speech and it’s up to search engines to do with it as they like. As far as the concern of it not being semantic and standards based, I agree with that and I see “nofollow” as a temporary stopgap until a much better solution is found. I seriously doubt we’ll see the use of “nofollow” in the next five years – something else will replace it that makes more sense.
Beyond that, the main argument is both ideological and philosophical. For every argument that you can make against it, I can make for it. It doesn’t make either of us correct – just our opinions different on how communication over the Internet should work. Personally, I prefer the control that “nofollow” gives me.
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On January 23, 18:13 CET, Edward Clarke said:
Jon, is this the control over the constant spamming it gives you or the control over the content and its semantics? I’m not sure I follow you.
You can read my thoughts on rel=nofollow but to summarise, it’s pointless from a publishers point of view.
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On January 23, 18:56 CET, Jens Meiert said:
Well, is there any point for
nofollowat all? It bothers even spammers … -
On January 24, 2:08 CET, Paul Annesley said:
If rel=nofollow can encourage high ranking sites to open themselves up to user-submitted content with less risk of turning themselves into PageRank-link-farms, then there must be some value in it.
I think it can be implemented in a non-harmful way, for example applying nofollow to user-submitted links until they have been moderated or approved in some way…?
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On February 15, 9:07 CET, Casey Woods said:
Agreed. nofollow doesn’t work at all and that is why I have removed it from my blog comments and trackbacks. Of course, I’ve implement 2 layers of anti-spam measures and I carefully read all comments that make it past Akismet and my captcha. Anything lame gets the link taken off of it and/or deleted.
“nofollow” is a great solution for blogs that get abandoned. However, it is unnecessary for active and moderated blogs.
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On July 26, 7:58 CEST, No Follow Sucks said:
I wouldn’t say No Follow is ‘harmful’, it does not really harm anybody. It may reduce interaction from vistors, that’s all.
Rather, I’d say the tag is pointless as anti-spam measures do a good job of stopping spam.
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On August 21, 15:09 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
Moved note: Also consider that at least Yahoo appears to ignore
nofollow. -
On September 5, 15:09 CEST, Anikrichard said:
hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you -
On September 8, 20:13 CEST, Jesper Rønn-Jensen said:
Right to the point, Jens.
For a long time, I have considered manually removing the nofollow attribute on comments from people I know, in order to boost my friends pagerank.
I’d love if there could be a setting built into wordpress, that could handle that for me.
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On September 10, 9:11 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
Jesper, right, that sounds useful. Yet one might argue that
nofollow“hurts” more than it helps
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On October 21, 22:38 CEST, Martin said:
You could argue it’s not harmful for the website or search engines, but you cannot argue that it benefits the commentor.
If someone leaves a useful or insightful comment then they should be rewarded. In this case, they get a link to a destination of their choosing. A small price to pay if you ask me.
