‘nofollow’ tag
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‘nofollow’ tag – what is it please? Is it used to stop spam? Where does one insert it into their blog?
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It is not used to stop spam.
It was promoted by Google as a way of them not giving ‘weight’ to links spammers might leave because lots of links to sites usually means a site is popular and therefore might rank higher in search results.
Of course seeing as Google decided on that linking and results first, spam farms and spammers jumped at the chance. In a vain effort to reduce the impact of the spammers Google asked people to use the no-follow attribute. What this means is Google helps create a problem, Google wants you to help solve it while it does nothing.
I am certain others will disagree with the above.—
Example:
http://www.what-a-great-site.com links to me normally.
Search engine sees that link, follows that link and crawls my site.
Search engine also assigns some sort of ‘value’ to my site because of who linked to it.Same site links to me and uses no-follow.
Search engine behaves the same way but assigns no value.<a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow ugc">link</a> -
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We see it in the comments here on WP.com. If you take a look at the source code of a Post of yours, you’ll note that the link you gave to the Harvard website has a nofollow ugc tag on it. It’s added automatically by the WP software.
I remember reading something by Matt saying that the reason why it was being added in was to combat spam. But since we have Akismet (and I’m running Bad Behavior on top of that), it’s kind of moot.
Plus since I feel like someone’s taken the time to comment on my blog, the least I can do is give a link back to their site.
Hmm, guess somebody’s reading my blog ;)
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Plus since I feel like someone’s taken the time to comment on my blog, the least I can do is give a link back to their site.
The link’s still there, so they’re still getting traffic from you. It just doesn’t count as a link for Google PageRank purposes. As I am not a spammer and comment only when I have something to say, this doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
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Agreed, but then you run into the case where one doesn’t have any links going to their site. We’ve run into that a couple of times here. I’d rather give them a link for the comment, have it count as a link to their site, and maybe just call it a ‘thank you’ for leaving the comment. :)
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i think a lot of the indignation about
rel=nofollow
comes from google promoting it as a way to decrease the prominence of blogs, while promoting it to bloggers as a way to combat spam.since it fights spam about as well as closing your eyes and pretending that they really _do_ think your blog is a “beautiful online information center”, i think we should stop listening to them and start remembering what the world was like before major corporations with static websites were considered the most authoritative sources of information
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drmike, I too dont like adding the nofollow attribute by default. There is no point of that after Akismet.
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