Loren Baker is mad as hell and he's not going to take it any longer. He's nailed his 13 reasons why the NoFollow attribute sucks to the blogosphere wall and banned them from Search Engine Journal.



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. -- from the Official Google blog, January 2005.

As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. NoFollow has to be called a good intention based on its genesis. Depriving spammers of the benefit of link love – what's not to like?

How about 13 things? Loren wrote that NoFollow doesn't stop the problem it was meant to prevent: spammers still spam:

Using NoFollow in blog comments, the original intent of the tag, does nothing to discourage comment spammers. Using other anti-spamming tools such as question, math and plugins such as Akismet and SpamKarma for Wordpress is much more effective.

To back up his stance, Loren has turned off the NoFollow attribute for links from comments on Search Engine Journal:

I’m not using NoFollow… as of now, Search Engine Journal is using the DoFollow Plugin to turn off the default NoFollow in our blog comments :)

I wonder if this will lead to more commenting?

Andy Beal gave his approval:

It’s a bold move, and I’ll be watching to see if it impacts the amount of spam or quality of comments.

Andy also said his Marketing Pilgrim site would soon test a plugin that "will reward loyal commentators with a link without the “nofollow” attribute." Sounds like NoFollow's days are numbered.

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Tag: NoFollow

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