Dylan, Jeremy and nofollow

Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: June 2nd, 2006 Published in: Blogging, Google, Link Building, Rants n Drama, Search Engine Optimisation, Spam

Nofollow no good? - Jeremy Zawodny based on a blog post by Dylan Tweeney - Google’s embarassing mistake.

Dylan quite logically points out the flaw with nofollow (ie, it’s simply easier to just moderate comments with links in them as blogging software such as Wordpress allows you to do), but goes a step further to claim that nofollow has both killed comments on blogs and done nothing to stem the flow of spam.

The reason? People only comment on blogs for PageRank apparently (or in the rare occaision where you may have a real live friend!).

I wish I wish I wish that a simple HTML tag would be enough to silence the endless wave of idiotic and ill-informed comments on the web - unfortunately it ain’t so baby!

Granted blogs are a somewhat different model of site, but look at forums such as WebmasterWorld or SearchEngineWatch. The members are all fully aware of their inability to post links (on the whole), yet will comment regularly and at times passionately about any given subject area. Ditto for any discussion forum on the net. The only difference is a reduction in link spamming (and yes, there has been a reduction in spam - many of my forums receive a lot less spam posts these days (even without nofollow! ;))).

Or look at ThreadWatch - a blog style news site for SEOs - they receive tonnes of people commenting and unlike WmW or SEW, posters don’t have any chance generating business from it (being a Pro news site with very few client type users).

Jeremy finishes off with a straight to the point statement, while targeted at generic websites should be used particularly in SEO:

Look. Linking is part of what makes the web work. If you’re actually concerned about every link you make being counted in some global database of site endorsements, you’re probably over-thinking just a bit. Life’s too short for that, ya know? Link and be linked to. Let the search engines sort it out.

Wouldn’t exactly say this is “support for nofollow crumbling” as reported on Threadwatch - maybe that day will come when Wordpress et all stop supporting the feature but we’re not there yet!

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