Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

First a little background. About six months ago Moveable Type, WordPress and other blogging providers announced support for the nofollow attribute when creating links within comments.

Many bloggers were excited that this would reduce comment spam while still allowing people to comment on their blogs. The rationale was that spammers would no longer have any incentive to create links between blogs since their PageRank wouldn’t increase.

At the time it really bothered me since while it would in fact punish spammers it would also publish bloggers since legitimate links wouldn’t be included within ranking algorithms (which yielded to nofollow). The problem was that at lot of people went storming through the gate with their support for nofollow. Almost overnight all the blogging packages as well as search engines (Google and Technorati for example) were supporting this new standard.

Now though we finally have dissent:

More and more, I hear bloggers complaining that their total incoming referred hits from Google have fallen dramatically. It’s my belief that this is happening because the total amount of link between blogs and that are indexed by Google have been reduced substantially by the rel=’NOFOLLOW’ attribute. Here’s a sample hit chart for a French blog.

Scott Rafer has more on this issue:

One side effect of NoFollow is to decrease the overall impact of blogs on Google’s PageRank algorithm(s). Given the unexpected volatility that blog publishing systems, RSS, and related technologies insert into PageRank, NoFollow is good for Google, good for traditional publishers, and bad for bloggers in ways that were not publicly predicted in January.

I couldn’t agree more. While I was working on Rojo’s aggregator I never gave this enough thought to be able to make a decision. I was deadlocked. It didn’t really matter either because we were working on a number of other issues that had higher priority.

i was honestly leaning towards considering it a ‘hint’ that the link might be spam but I didn’t want to trash the link altogether.

I wish I had spoken up more at the time. Now though there’s nonofollow.net which is designed to oppose the nofollow attribute.

The attribute rel=”nofollow” for hypertext links in HTML web pages was originally proposed (http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html) as a way to limit the effect of blog and forum comment spam on search engines’ indexes. However, the proposal has some serious drawbacks. We want you to watch the spread of nofollow and support us. We give you some very good reasons against nofollow and show you that there are a lot of people out there, thinking like we do.

I guess I’m not opposed to this if the link is 100% spam. The problem is that if you know for certain that the link is spam then there’s no reason to keep it in the first place. The only valid reason would be for intellectual citation while not lending to the site’s PageRank. That said, there’s such a narrow percentage of links that fall into this realm as to make nofollow irrelevant.

We’ll see. My hope is that other technologies can come into play here which can negate the need for nofollow moving forward.