Back in January Google made “big waves” in the blogging community with their announcement of the “nofollow” attribute. This attribute, says Google, when applied to a link on a web page, will tell Google to not follow that link or include it in any way for calculating PageRank or for spidering purposes. Other major search engines hopped on the bandwagon to support the initiative.
Why all the fuss?
Why else? Spam. Google’s explanation was as follows:
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 its own this is a wonderful approach. This is the big guys saying “hey, we realize that its in our own interest to help you in your fight against comment spam because that spam exists solely because of our practices. So here’s something that you can do to help us and yourself.” Seemingly all of the major blog software climbed aboard right from the start, including WordPress. Indeed, it seemed almost a holy jihad at times with Matt — intrepid WordPress developer — saying in response to some peoples’ concerns about the lack of choice in enabling “nofollow” support in WordPress:
Make a plugin for it then. Everything goes through filters. However out-of-the-box WP will have nofollow support.
Some, myself included, would call that callous. Not providing the option to disable “nofollow” without resorting to a plugin is mildly asinine. But then, I’m not the developer and there is an option to disable the support, however obtuse.
So, where does that leave us?
Where are we now?
The release of WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn introduced this required “nofollow” support into WordPress. Everyone running this version of WordPress has, unless they’ve taken explicit action against it, all of their commenters’ links tagged as “nofollow.” I did until this morning frankly because I forgot about it. Since then I remembered and found a well-written, simple plugin that does a fine job of removing the nofollow support. As an aside, it should still be easier than that — as modular and well-designed as WordPress is it’s inconceivable to me that the string “nofollow” should be hardcoded more than once in the code base, but it’s sprinkled through a handful of locations — but the plugin does a fine job of removing every incarnation.
Does the default “nofollow” implementation have merit? In the vast majority of cases, yes. Frankly a large percentage of the people that own blogs don’t have the knowledge to make the decision to use “nofollow” intelligently. These are the same people that have wide-open sites that are veritable honeypots for spammers, that don’t police their comments regularly, that aren’t cognizant of the issue in the slightest. For that reason the default action of WordPress is appropriate: tack a “nofollow” onto every single link in every single comment, because it’s likely there are spam comments there.
The World Wide Sinkhole
To my mind a well-run blog is not the place for “nofollow.” I don’t have comment spam. Not that you can see anyway. I am vigilant. I don’t allow any comment spam that happens to make it through the layers of defenses that exist in my installation to stay visible — and more important, spiderable — for long. In fact, with the settings that I currently have I don’t see how it would even be possible for a comment spam to make it onto my site and be visible to anyone. (Trackbacks are a different story and one that I so far have been unaffected by but others haven’t been as lucky, and I’ll jump over that fence when I get to it.) Therefore, for me “nofollow” is relatively pointless. Worse, I’d say it’s harmful.
Harmful? To my mind, yes. By effectively removing from search engine consideration any link in my comments I’m creating a dead end on my site in many ways. Humans can follow any link they wish on my site, true. But denying all of my commenters the ability to point at something — be it their site in their author link or some article that bears weight to an argument or some product that I might consider instead of one I’m discussing — and have that something considered a part of the overall Web part of this World Wide Web is needlessly restrictive and reduces the effectiveness of the very thing that the search engines are trying to do.
The Death of PageRank
Google and its ilk have, for better or for worse, transcended from being “search engines” to defining a large part of what the Internet is and how it’s made up. If I have an article talking about a particular guitar product with a link to that product and someone comments that another product might fill my needs better and links to that product the net results in terms of “linkshare” are far different in a “nofollow” environment. That commenter’s link, though obviously topical, helpful, and useful to the humans that visit the site, is ignored by search engines due to nofollow and therefore the “Web” part of the web ends at that comment. The overall net result would tend toward “blog isolationism.” Why would that commenter post a comment on my site that results in, essentially, nothing in terms of impacting the “web” structure when he could post a dissenting opinion on his own site that would get full due by the Great Entry Points, the search engines? And, given that trackbacks and pingbacks are generally “nofollowed” as well, he’d likely forgo that opportunity as well since there’s literally no incentive.
Given that everyone is “nofollowing” what does that say about Google’s PageRank and its usefulness and accuracy? For everyone savvy enough to upgrade to the latest but either not savvy enough to disable nofollow or who have no desire to disable nofollow, our commenters’ links no longer hold relevance to Google et al. What about all the poor yokels who don’t upgrade? Well, they’re likely still getting hammered by spammers daily and their links will be followed regardless. The spammers still win on those fronts, where in the meantime all those links from everyone else are no longer calculated in the grand scheme of PageRank. As a result, overall, spammers will almost tend to increase in PageRank as they continue to wrack up the open links from naive, legacy blogging software, while all of us “conscientious” bloggers who do upgrade have our own external contributions and every other external contributor’s contributions degraded in search relevance. This is a win?
You’re relevant
I don’t want to contribute to the “tarpit.” I think that my readers’ contributions are as relevant and noteworthy as my own, so I’ve disabled “nofollow” here. I’m not encouraging dissent, but I am encouraging people to consider their own thoughts on this front and decide accordingly for them. A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that people should contribute because they want to and not because they’ll reap some somewhat intangible benefit, and that is plausible. But neither do I see reason to remove even that slight benefit for no reason, and right now there is no reason.
[...] per disattivare tale opzione: basta avere il blog sotto controllo… Riferimenti: -> The no-follow agenda -> Nofollow, un tag html per battere lo spam sui blog [...]