nofollow is No Good!
Published on January 19, 2005 at 10:42 AM EST
Last updated on October 17, 2005 at 11:29 AM EST
In the Discussions category.
This morning I saw a flurry of new information from many sources about this thing called rel=”nofollow” which is supposed to help stop comment spamming. Read about it’s interaction with Movable Type at Six Log, Movable Type, and the Six…
This morning I saw a flurry of new information from many sources about this thing called rel="nofollow" which is supposed to help stop comment spamming. Read about it’s interaction with Movable Type at Six Log, Movable Type, and the Six Apart Professional Network, and a little more generic info is at Google.
Either I don’t fully understand what nofollow is supposed to do, or it really is a dumb idea. I’m confident it’s the latter.
Well, ok, those who implement nofollow will definitely help in not raising a spammer’s Google PageRank. But that’s the only benefit. As has been pointed out, a legitimate commenter’s link won’t count toward their PageRank, either. Honestly, I like that I can help other’s have a more popular site.
If this nofollow plugin will (eventually) cut comment spam, maybe it’s worth it. But I’m not so sure it’ll cut, slow, or otherwise impede spammer activity.
I make lots of effort to keep comment spam off of this site. MT-Blacklist does a good job of keeping most spam out. It doesn’t catch everything, though, and if a comment or TrackBack spam eeks through, the longest it stays on danandsherree.com is going to be during the overnight while I’m sleeping. So, with rel="follow" enabled, if a comment spam makes it onto this site and if a search engine visits that page in the few hours the spam is on there, that spammer won’t get any PageRank benefit from it. Plus, those legitimate commenters have lost any PageRank benefit.
Gee, rel="nofollow" really helps me and the commenter’s on this site, doesn’t it? If you’re adamant about keeping comment and TrackBack spam off of your site the nofollow plugin won’t help.
Ok, maybe rel="nofollow" isn’t aimed at me. Maybe it’s aimed at those bloggers who have a bunch of comment spam already on their site. Err… wait a minute, they didn’t install MT-Blacklist or other spam-fighting plugins; why would they install the nofollow plugin? Nope, rel="nofollow" clearly isn’t aimed at these people.
Step back and look at the big picture:
- In the short-term,
rel="nofollow"will have little to no effect on spammers. Those of us who keep comment spam off of our websites will still keep it off, negating any PageRank benefit a spammer might get, and causing us the headache of removing it. Those who don’t keep comment spam off their site won’t install the nofollow plugin and will continue to receive spam, and the spammers will benefit from that. - In the long-term,
rel="nofollow"will have little to no effect on spammers. Those of us who keep comment spam off of our websites will still keep it off, negating any PageRank benefit a spammer might get, and still causing us the headache of removing it. Those who don’t keep comment spam off their site will continue to receive spam, and the spammers will benefit from that.
So, uh, how does this nofollow plugin help us, exactly? If everybody made use of the plugin, I bet it’d work. But then, if everybody made use of the other spam-removal software I bet we wouldn’t even need this.
If you found this article useful, please consider supporting this site through a donation.
Comments
So far, there are 7 comments and Trackbacks on this entry. Add yours!
The reference plugin appends rel=”nofollow” to all comment links. There’s nothing stopping you from writing a more robust plugin that will de-nofollow approved comments or not include the attribute in TypeKey visitors posts.
In the long term, people who currently don’t keep comment spam off their sites will generally shut down their sites due to lack of interest. They will, of course, be replaced with new people who don’t keep comment spam off their sites. The difference is that commenting scripts will likely include rel=”nofollow” by default and these lazy souls won’t bother to change that.
Eventually, enough of the lazy people without rel=”nofollow” will be replaced with the ones with rel=”nofollow” and so comment spamming will eventually not be worth the time or money.
You, of course, are free to omit rel=”nofollow” from your site and if you keep it spam free it will have exactly the same long-term effect on PageRank. rel=”nofollow” is to help the people who don’t know or don’t care that their blog is being overrun by spam.
I was thinking the same thing. I’m a beast with MT-blacklist, and based on the newest edition of movableType, with comment approvals and what not, it works great. this is being presented as a way to kill comment spam dead in its tracks, but that’s like sayin that vitamin C will kill the common cold. It might help reduce it, but it’s still gonna come smack you upside the head one day.
Think you misunderstand…
Nofollow doesn’t serve the same purpose as something like Blacklist. Nofollow won’t prevent spam on your individual site but the idea is preventing spam on a wider scale over time. By having it take away some of the motivation behind Spammer’s desire to leave such spam (if it is widely used) the hope is that it would in turn reduce spam across the board. *knock on wood*
Plus, I don’t really know about PageRanking being given for leaving comments so I don’t really have a problem with it being used across the board. But this is only a first step, there is no reason why you can’t develop a ‘white list’ for your commenters who’s sites you would want to boost. Also, it has other practical uses- as in linking to a site which you don’t want to support, with the nofollow tag you can do this without boosting there PageRank.
Anyways, there are too many naysayer on this good first step…
Nofollow doesn’t serve the same purpose as something like Blacklist. Nofollow won’t prevent spam on your individual site but the idea is preventing spam on a wider scale over time. By having it take away some of the motivation behind Spammer’s desire to leave such spam (if it is widely used) the hope is that it would in turn reduce spam across the board. *knock on wood*
I understand that. But, as I eluded to, if you keep comment spam off of your web site, you’re already doing your part—adding nofollow support won’t change anything. And if you haven’t done anything to keep comment spam off of your site yet, why would you do this?
Google’s approach to spam comments is a bad idea…
James McGovern
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/leadership
Shaved 28 second on my MT 3.15—>3.16 upgrade
;-) And I managed to avoid this NoFollow plug-in, it seems to me using MTBlackList or the like is a far. BTW your blanket block of (p-o-k-e-r) causedd me a bit of grief since I caould not figure out what was killing my comment (it’s part of my URL). Bloody spammers
TrackBack URL for nofollow is No Good!:
http://www.eatdrinksleepmovabletype.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/230