Hate The Grind

Quick History of nofollow
For those unfamiliar with the nofollow tag, it is a tag you can include in your html code to let the search engines know that a link should not be followed, or indexed. It is essentially a tag for webmasters to let the search engines know that the link in question is not approved or endorsed.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft worked with many blog based CMS vendors back in the day to fight blog comment spam. Their solution at the time to combat comment spam was to have the CMS automatically add “rel=nofollow” to all links in comments. The search engines would then automatically filter out all links that had this tag in them so spamming in comments would essentially be rendered useless in terms of link building.

Fast Forward To Today
Its now March 2007, and bloggers everywhere are still combating blog spam. The fact that the nofollow tag is present in links in blog comments has not reduced the amount of blog spam at all. Apparently spammers are not trying to build link popularity via blog comments, or they simply are not aware that there is such a thing as nofollow. Another plausible reason would be that spamming blogs is simply too easy (the introduction of junk e-mail filters did not slow down e-mail spam either).

While Google and Microsoft are still not crawling nofollow links, it appears that as of January 2007 Yahoo is crawling and indexing nofollow links. Whether or not their algorithm treats nofollow links differently is uncertain, but it is clear that Yahoo is following links despite the nofollow tag. Perhaps newer tags will be introduced, notrust? noendorse?

Other Comment Spam Fighting Tools More Effective?
Tools such as Akismet and Spam Karma are two very effective plugins to combat blog comment spam. As you may have read in my WordPress plugins post, I use Akismet to help me filter out the comment spam. Akismet helps me filter out over 90% of the comment spammers. Basically, all the script based spammers are stopped in their tracks by Akismet. The spammers that do make an effort to make their comments even remotely look like legitimate are held for moderation so they never appear in my blog comments either.

Comment spammers will never stop, but with effective spam fighting plugins for bloggers available today, is there really a need for the nofollow tag? Yahoo has begun to index nofollow links, and Google has extended the use of the nofollow tag for webmasters to identify paid text links. Microsoft seems to be just following Google’s lead by ignoring nofollow links but we’ll see if that will change over time.

So Is nofollow useless?
Since spammers are ignoring the nofollow tag anyway, I believe a more effective comment spam fighting tool would be for more blogging software to incorporate plugins like Akismet and Spam Karma. The nofollow tag is completely useless in fighting comment spam. The only purpose it serves today is for search engines to filter out spam on their listings. The original purpose of the nofollow tag was to help bloggers fight comment spam, but today the only winners are the search engines themselves as millions of bloggers are helping them filter out the bad results. So, the nofollow tag is not entirely useless, its just useless for you as a blogger to help reduce comment spam.

While the nofollow tag is pretty much useless in terms of fighting comment spam, I highly doubt it is going to disappear anytime soon. While it is not obvious, there are some advantages to removing the nofollow tag in your blog’s comments section. In fact, removing the nofollow tag can actually be your most effective tool in building an active community. However, in a bid to keep this post short I will discuss that in Part II of this post.

Other posts you may be interested in:

WordPress To Remove NoFollow Tag?

How To Get Free Quality Links To Your Blog

Get Rid Of NoFollow To Grow Your Blog

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