Nofollow Monstrosity
(for people who don’t know, ‘nofollow’ is a word inside a link telling search engine not to give any credit to that link. why would anyone use it? to discourage spam.)
Many people wrote about this topic, but I want to focus on something that others did not dedicate enough attention to.
People increasingly use social sites, and sites that are built by user contributions. There are so many great things that resulted from this (one of my favorite reference sources is Wikipedia which is built by millions of users). However, there are some serious consequences caused by the introduction of ‘nofollow’ that many people are not aware of.
- Internet is rapidly going thru a PageRank concentration process (equivalent to real world capitalization where few people own most capital). PageRank is a very important factor that Google uses in determining where your site will rank when someone searches for relevant words. (why care about Google? 70% of searches are done with Google.) PageRank roughly tells how many other sites link to yours, and therefore how ‘important’ is your site. How is this PageRank capitalization happening? Many people link to social sites from their blogs and websites, and they rarely put ‘nofollow’ on their sites. Most social sites, on the other hand, started putting by default ‘nofollow’ on all external links. Consequence? For example, bookmark your new site ‘example123.com’ at ’stumbleupon.com’. If you google for ‘example123′, stumbleupon.com page about it (with no content but the link and title) will be on top, while your site (with actual content) that you searched for will be below. Imagine what effect this PageRank capitalization has when you search for things other than your domain name!
- Each site and blog owner is contributing to this unknowingly and voluntarily. Do any of these look familiar?
Most blogs and sites have at least few of these on almost every single page. Not a single one of these buttons has ‘nofollow’, meaning that people give a very good chunk of their site’s importance to these social sites (hint: importance that you give to these buttons is importance taken away from other internal links on your site). Most of social sites however, do have ‘nofollow’ on a link pointing back to peoples sites after users link to them for being good. Conclusion, people give them a lot of credit on almost every page, while these sites give nothing in return. (Two ‘good’ sites among these, that I know of, are Digg that does not have ‘nofollow’, and Slashdot that tries to identify real spam and puts ‘nofollow’ on those links only. There are probably few more.) - This can be easily prevented, and PageRank can be re-distributed, in no time! Solution is very simple. ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.‘ If you have a WordPress blog (as millions of internet users do), download plugins Antisocial and Nofollow Reciprocity. First one puts ‘nofollow’ on above buttons, second puts ‘nofollow’ on all external links pointing to ‘bad’ sites. If you are using some other blogging application, try to find similar nofollow plugins. Otherwise, or if you have a regular site, you can download Social Bookmark Buttons with Nofollow.
Note: PageRank and site importance explanations above are very simplified, but are good enough to backup the argument made in the article.
September 19th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Thank you for writing this article. Bloggers should be sharing their link equity with other bloggers, not wasting it on giant social-networking sites. I link to a handful of link-sharing/social-network sites and have added nofollow attributes to all of them. Thank you again for reminding us about this important issue.
November 23rd, 2007 at 11:50 am
The Nofollow tag was created simply to stop/prevent spamming (eg comment spam) simply because blogging became more and more frequent and it still does its job there. A different approach is indeed to manually approve them.
December 3rd, 2007 at 6:34 pm
I find it interesting how this blog phenomenon started and now it being controlled. The power struggle over PR is very similar to the power struggle over money in the US. The gap between the haves and have nots continues to widen as the haves come up with new ways to keep the have nots from getting anything they have.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
We must certainly stop the rot, and let blogs share links freely. Let’s put a stop to the dictatorial regimes the NWO has in store for us.
The simple answer is to insert rel=follow on all links thereby overriding the default nofollow code
Read more here
http://solreka.com/blog/blogging/nofollow/
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:49 pm
The real problem is that Go0gle is too powerful; it has a near-monopoly. That’s why people are forced to worry about PageRank; _their_ vague evaluation of your site.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
However, the Internet is quite popular movement DOFOLLOW. And to date, well-developed.
NOFOLLOW really needed to prevent spam, or to correct placement of the importance of pages within the site - the internal optimization.
October 23rd, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Yeah, nofollow makes life harder for SEOs and marketers and doesnt stop spammers at all. Google and other search engines would do the world a favor if they stopped acting like gods.