DoFollow 001Letting the link love flow

On January 18, 2005 the Official Google Blog published an item entitled Preventing comment spam.

From the article itself:

If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

On the same day Yahoo and MSN both announced they wanted a piece of the nofollow pie, read Working Together Against Blog Spam and A Defense Against Comment Spam.

A host of other services such as Flikr and Buzznet threw their weight behind the microformat too in a display of unified coordination.

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch welcomed this move at the time:

While link or comment spamming isn't going away, it's still heartening that it will be less attractive. Site owners have been given an important new tool that lets them control indexing -- something they've not had offered for years. Perfect or not, I'm glad it's emerged.

It's worth reading this thread on the SearchEngineLand forums as a way of reminding yourself just what points for and against were brought up at the time.

But for those that don't have the time or can't be bothered I'll summarise the main bones of contention:

For:

1. It gives bloggers and webmasters more control over their own website and how it interacts with others across the net.

Against:

1. It will destroy online communities that are reliant on their users being “paid” by a linkback for their contributions
2. It will primarily hurt small bloggers who are dependent on trackbacks and link “karma”.
3. It will not stop comment spam

Aaron Wall summarised a lot of the reservations made about nofollow from forum members on a post he made on January 19:

* Many bloggers have amazing link popularity due in part to comments they left on other blogs. This will cause lots of blogs which were primarily connected by comments to lose a good bit of their link popularity.

* Many automated blog spam scripts may work harder to find the blogs which are slow to change. While the number of spamable blogs will go down the value of effective blog spamming will go up.

* Bloggers will have a big riot celebrating this move. After time passes they will still get spammed and realize that this will not immediately cure the problem.

* More bloggers will get approached with a bit of $$$ for writing editorials. More bloggers will sell out.

* Some people who were posting useful and thoughtful comments in part to gain link popularity may post less often.

* Some worry that people will abuse this tag for SEO purposes, but those who would do that could just as easily use other redirects, so I really do not see any change there.

* This change does make the role of link popularity (and how to keep it) much more visible. The "keep your link popularity" line of thinking may kill off a ton of natural linking, which in the end really does not help anyone.

Well four years later and the world has kept turning, the internet has kept growing and spam has kept flowing.

In assessing the contemporary popularity of nofollow we can use the rather controversy statistics presented by SeoMoz's Linkscape tool, from which it has been found that 1.83% of all links on the web have nofollow applied to them. Of that 1.83% 61% are external-pointing, while 39% are internal.

It may seem a small percentage but we are talking about billions of links here.

As the figures above point to the practice of SEO sculpting has become quite widespread, with non-important links being nofollowed.

Is the introduction of nofollow a good thing for ordinary webmasters and bloggers? If it gives them some control over their own website then it is, and I think that nofollow can, in certain circumstances, help to deflect spammers.

It has undoubtedly affected "blackhat" SEO, as last year's "break'n'enter" tactics demonstrated. If they have to resort to cracking somebody's website open in order to insert thousands of spammy links into the code then you know things for them are getting desperate.

The fact is though that most people who operate under the umbrella of blackhat are lazy and stupid - you don't have to spend long on either Syndk8 or Black Hat Forums to come to that conclusion.

Most, if not all commercially available comment spamming tools do not offer the distinction between nofollow and "dofollow" blogs - they spam everything; and blackhatters want as many links as possible because in their eyes you can rank with anything as long as you have enough incoming links.

That's not to say that they don't target blogs that leave off the nofollow microformat, because they do (I'll write more about that in later articles); but don't presume that using nofollow makes you safe from spammers.