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To “nofollow” or not, that is the question…

Angsuman Chakraborty

January 24th, 2005

Google has adopted a standard where any link with the attribute rel="nofollow" is not spidered by google.

This can effectively dampen the enthusiasm of spammers to spam your comments (comment spam).
It is like throwing the baby with the bathwater. In fact if a blogger is averse to people putting in links he can always disallow anchor tags in the comments.
And I don't think it will have significant impact on reducing comment spam. Because automated tools are used for comment spamming and there will always be certain sites which will not implement this. Also other search engines use link based ranking like Microsoft and things will not change overnight, if they change at all.
This move will only serve Google to improve its search engine ranking, nothing more.

Based on my experience I think that CAPTCHA is the best way (with numerical computation or audio alternatives for visually impaired) to stop comment spam fully.

I started receiving around 600 comment spams a day. After installing CAPTCHA the number came down to 0 (zero) and has remained ever since! Frankly I don't think a better alternative is required.

So to answer the original question - Say no to "nofollow" is my theme.

Filed under Google, Pro Blogging, Technology, Web | Tags: Fact | Comment on this Article 9 Comments | Email this Article

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Dave's Chalkboard Says:
January 24th, 2005 at 5:23 am

To “nofollow” or not, that is the question…
To “nofollow” or not, that is the question…
Google has adopted a standard where any link with the attribute rel=”nofollow” is not spidered by google.

This can effectively dampen the enthusiasm of spammers to spam your comments (comment spa…

Doug Says:
January 24th, 2005 at 6:43 am

MSN and Yahoo! quickly agreed to handle nofollow. Not that I think that it’ll make a difference. Spamming is essentially cost-free to the spammer, and he has no incentive to determine who is using nofollow and who isn’t. He’ll just spam everybody with the expectation that some of it will “stick.” The people who have spammed my own weblog got nothing out of it, but they keep trying. Probably 80% or more of my traffic is from spammers.

I’m not a fan of CAPTCHA. I consider it a tool of last resort. And I don’t think that it will provide any sort of permanent solution, either. In the long run the spammers will develop CAPTCHA-crackers. In the short term, there are rumors (or are they just urban legends?) that some spammers are getting people to decode the CAPTCHAs for them.

I think that the search engine people are trying to dodge the real issue. They should have groups who are charged with blocking all spammer sites from the search engines. But that’s not a simple job, and it’s one that will certainly attract lawsuits from people who claim that they were improperly labelled as being spammers. Instead of doing that, they said that it’s not their problem, it’s the weblogs that are causing the problem.

Tom Raftery Says:
February 15th, 2005 at 10:14 pm

On the nofollow front - I agree the attribute is not the answer - especially if you are a blogger who knows what they are doing and controls comment spam.

WordPress 1.5 was released yesterday with the nofollow attribute turned on by default and no way to toggle it through the admin interface.

I wrote a piece on how to disable the nofollow attribute in WordPress 1.5 in my own blog - in case it is of any use to you.

Regards,

Tom

Simple thoughts… » Blog Archive » WordPress 1.5 Plugin - Strip “nofollow” tag from comment URLs Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 9:17 pm

[...] ://www.wordpress.org” rel=’nofollow’> WordPress 1.5, a Weblog/CMS software, comes with “nofollow” enabled by default, with no option to disable it! [...]

Simple Thoughts Says:
March 18th, 2005 at 2:14 am

I have written few articles on nofollow and developed a plugin for WordPress 1.5 to disable "nofollow". Several other people have also written excellent articles on the topic, many better then mine.

This post will be used to track people’…

saurab Says:
December 5th, 2005 at 8:48 am

In my opinion, nofollow is not the right way to limit comment spam. A simple use of captchas is a good enough deterrent.. while it may inconvenience genuine people, but there’s a fair price to pay. Also, it could be programmatically arranged that people on your blogroll would be able to comment without the need for validating captcha text….

Bennett Says:
October 10th, 2006 at 3:59 pm

There is a problem with nofollow, but it’s actually a very simple one. Nofollow is a legitimate and useful tool (but not for stopping spam). The problem is its name: “nofollow” is misleading.

Blog-abfertigung: Weblog-Einsteiger aus der Frankenmetropole Nürnberg Says:
December 12th, 2006 at 9:47 am

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