As an occasional reader of Slashdot I recently noticed some links on their pages in red-on-black and blinking. This is a little bit I threw in my Firefox userChrome.css to expose any hyperlink which has been tagged with rel=”nofollow”.
If you somehow haven’t heard of nofollow, this is how it works: You add it in to your blogging software so that it tags any links contributed by your users with rel=”nofollow”, and then when Google or other search engines see this relationship, they don’t follow that particular link. The reason this came about was the comment spam which has plagued blogs for a while now. It aims to stop comment spam by denying spammers higher ranking in search engines such as Google.
What they don’t tell you is that it also penalizes legitimate commenters and the links to completely valid sites that they post to your blog. I may have just discovered the cure for cancer, but if I post it to my blog, and someone links with nofollow, Google isn’t going to find it. And even if it does find it by other means, the PageRank it gives it will be so small as to effectively hide it behind 32,000 completely irrelevant sites.
Nofollow is therefore one of those “feel good” measures that throws out the baby with the bath water. And now, inexplicably, slashdot has implemented it, with not a word to its users. I can’t begin to guess why /. would implement this, as it isn’t really being hit with this type of spam. Instead, it’s being hit by unique-to-slashdot comments by, for instance, the Gay Nigger Association of America and other various trolls. Nofollow isn’t going to stop them. So why has /. implemented it?
My only guess is that they are trying to protect bloggers from comment spammers who scan /. looking for links to more blogs to spam. That’s nice of you guys, but I’d rather have the PageRank. I can stop comment spammers quite well enough on my own, thank you.
Nofollow is ill-thought-out and, if implemented widely, will destroy blogging as we know it by breaking down the interconnections between bloggers. Even as a stopgap solution to comment spam, it fails, because comment spammers are in no way obliged to honor it. They can continue spamming and scrape your site for links anyway. We need a solution to comment spam, but in so doing, we must not break down the relationships between bloggers which have driven blogging into widespread popularity, lest we risk destroying blogging altogether.
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Michael Hampton
Mar 21, 2005
Apparently /. isn’t putting nofollow on every page just yet. But they’re definitely there on some of them. Consider this bit of source yanked from here:
<A HREF="http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/18/BUGURBP6N353.DTL" title="sfgate.com" rel="nofollow">Free iPod? Right..</a>As you can clearly see, it’s present. From just browsing around, it seems that if you hit the site with http://slashdot.org/. you will get nofollow tags, but if you use, e.g. http://apple.slashdot.org/. you will not get them (yet). So I guess they’re partially implemented.
adam
Mar 21, 2005
This is a valid concern, but 1) I am not seeing the rel=nofollow tags on links in posts on /. (maybe this is just in anonymous coward posts?) 2) What makes you say that google is going to put a negative rank on the sites with a rel=nofollow. That would be a pretty stupid tactic, as most links in blogs are not spam. From what I’ve heard they are just going to be ignored. Assuming that google will reduce the rank of a site that is linked to in a blog is somewhat irresponsible without backing it up.
adam
Mar 21, 2005
I just checked, it’s odd, some links get the nofollow and some don’t. Interesting.
Michael Hampton
Mar 21, 2005
And even that doesn’t seem to be right. The tags are definitely present, but not on all external links. There doesn’t seem to be any particular pattern to it. Perhaps a bug in slashdot’s implementation?
In any case, to answer your other question, Google doesn’t rank it at all, because to Google, a link tagged with nofollow does not exist. There is nothing to rank! It’s as if you had never created the link at all. Since search engines are heavily driven toward inbound links as a ranking mechanism, this will effectively reduce the ranking of sites which are linked to by nofollow, because the search engine will see fewer links for that site.
dr Dave
Mar 26, 2005
Not to troll <cough> but…
Say you do find that cure for cancer, and instead of, well, ya know, consider a publication in Nature or Science, you go your way and post a note in your blog (“OMG, OMG, I think I just cured cancer this morning! LOL. And that girl from the lab so totally smiled at me yesterday! I think I have a crush! OMFGLOL!”)… How should Google go about rewarding your effort and guide people in need of a cure to your website?
Maybe from the number of people who do link to your entry (and with a somewhat greater weight given to large universities and respected science publications rather than your five thousands LJ friends). I dare hope that, were you to find that cure, you would have better things to do than doing the round of all your friend’s blogs to post a comment about it (“Hey dude! you gotta check this entry on my blog: I so totally cured cancer today. Check it out, it’s completely awesome!”).
The difference between the two is that there is little to NO chance the former kind of link would ever end up with a no-follow (being actual content etc.), while comment URLs, insightful or not, might end up getting slapped with one. Let’s also make it well clear here, that, even with a no-follow, nothing, absolutely nothing, prevents people intrigued by your comment from clicking on your URL and go check for themselves. Which is after all the initial and hopefully main goal of your comment.
Now, I am not in principle strongly against the PageRank stroke-fest induced by blogosphere incestuous linking habits. Yet, maybe it would be time to realize it is neither a god-given privilege, nor really so desirable for anybody (blogger and google users alike) as it is most definitely not really serving other purpose than help chatty bloggers build their branding (I certainly do not feel excited at the thought of Slashdot’s top ten trollers showing up in all my Google searches).
But the real debate isn’t even there: it’s a matter of what you lose (some rather debatable incentive offered to people, for gracing your blog with their comments) vs. what you get (absolute, ultimate, peace from blog spam, provided everybody agree to just shut up and swallow their medication).
I mean: between you and me, having just spent the last few weeks coding what I have, it certainly would be great to keep the effort worth it by keeping the spam coming. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t really mind just forgetting about the whole damn thing and blogging in peace without the need for any prevention, kickass as it may be…
Michael Hampton
Mar 26, 2005
The problem is, everyone will not agree to use nofollow, for exactly that reason. Nofollow can only work if it’s universal, and it cannot be, because it has a substantial downside to it. People who don’t like it won’t use it, and then you’re right back where you started.
I’m not willing to accept the downside to nofollow, and many others aren’t either, and that’s why it will never be universal. As “good” as the solution may be, if everyone used it, you will never get everyone to use it.
Oh, and nofollow isn’t the ultimate, absolute solution to blog spam either. A .45 to the head of every spammer is.
Tom
Apr 06, 2005
What’s your CSS so that I can enable this ‘nofollow alert’?
Michael Hampton
Apr 06, 2005
a[rel~=nofollow] { color: red !important; background: black !important; text-decoration: blink !important; }You can, of course, do something else if you want it to appear differently.
May 23, 2005
IO ERROR
livejasmin
Dec 17, 2005
How do you make “red-on-black and blinking” on nofollow links on firefox, what code do you add in userChrome.css ?
May 13, 2006
Nofollow revisited - Homeland Stupidity
dsw
Aug 13, 2006
I also have recently removed nofollow tag from my blog to reward my members with backlinks. They actually particapte to increase content my site. If you have comment moderation on your website, then there is no need for nofollow.
Raphael
Dec 18, 2006
I just heard of nofollow, and instantly I see it everywhere! I think search engine consultants are using it EVERYWHERE to keep the Google link juice on their customers’ pages. And that’s what will kill the nofollow attribute, I think…
Google never intended this to be a way to trick their algorithm into keeping linkjuice on certain pages instead of following relevant links. They intended it to be used for irrelevant links.
spitbook
Apr 18, 2007
There is no need for rel=nofollow. People can still spam, it’s just not worth anything. Comment moderation is the way to go.
Paul
Jun 09, 2007
Doh! I just posted on slashdot today thinking i was going to get a link back then realised about the nofollow thing, googled it and found this article.. If you cant get links to your site and PR by commenting others and no-one knows about your site, how on earth do you actively improve the PR apart from reciprical links.. hmmm.. i know i know, some will say ‘provide good content’ but thats highly subjective. Youll have to forgive me as im just a beginner at this…
Karl Erfurt
Jul 27, 2007
I strongly agree with your views on the nofollow issue. Now we just need to spread the word throughout the blogging community so that more webmasters can join the NoNofollow movement and restore blogs to their rightful place on the Internet and in the search results.
I have removed the nofollow tags on my blog through the use of a plugin called NoFollow Case by Case. This plugin is an excellent solution to the nofollow dilemma because it allows bloggers to receive credit for their contributions to other blogs while still allowing us the ability to block spam comments without having to censor the content. I installed the plugin on my blog approximately two months ago, and so far it is working very well even after changing themes.
eco Boris
Sep 10, 2007
Missed the boat! At first about 2 years ago when all the social networks and other forums had DO FOLLOW. I am guessing that they got so huge that they got a letter from Google to put a stop to it. Mainly referring to DIGG and Stumbleupon. Slashdot has gained a ton of popularity in the last 5 years or so too…
Love the theme of the site!
Boris
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