{"id":94,"date":"2006-10-24T12:33:15","date_gmt":"2006-10-24T02:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/2006\/10\/24\/nofollow-is-not-as-bad-as-you-think\/"},"modified":"2006-10-24T12:42:58","modified_gmt":"2006-10-24T02:42:58","slug":"nofollow-is-not-as-bad-as-you-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/2006\/10\/24\/nofollow-is-not-as-bad-as-you-think\/","title":{"rendered":"Nofollow is not as bad as you think"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote recently about why <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/2006\/08\/09\/nofollow-good-idea-bad-name\/\">the worst thing about nofollow is its name<\/a>. My response to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/2006\/08\/09\/nofollow-good-idea-bad-name\/#comment-6968\">Maxpower&#8217;s thought-provoking comment<\/a> grew too long for the comments section, so here&#8217;s a slightly longer exposition of what&#8217;s wrong and right with nofollow. <\/p>\n<p>First, for avoidance of doubt, here are some of my main points.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Nofollow does not reduce comment spam<\/li>\n<li>Nofollow reduces comment spam&#8217;s effect on search results<\/li>\n<li>Nofollow is potentially useful to all web users<\/li>\n<li>Google does not (as far as I know) use nofollow as well as it could<\/li>\n<li>The name &#8220;nofollow&#8221; is inappropriately ad hoc<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m not a nofollow apologist; I just don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s as bad as they say it is<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p>what if I left a comment on your blog, as I do now, that mentions that there is a great resource called NoNofollow and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all about NoFollow, a subject discussed most prominently on this very page. I think its not only very informative, but also highly relevant to this discussion. Doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that page deserve some pagerank[?]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yes it does, but <em>not<\/em> because it&#8217;s relevant. It deserves PageRank from that link because it&#8217;s a &#8220;genuine&#8221; link, not some automatically created spam link. If I have a blog all about Viagra, and some spambot posts a comment linking to a cheap online Viagra shop, then that link is both informative and highly relevant. But it&#8217;s still spam and should not transmit PageRank to the site, nor result in a PageRank penalty to my site for linking to a &#8220;bad neighbourhood&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>You raise a very good point: Many comment and trackback links are highly relevant and really should participate in ranking calculations. However, in general, Google cannot tell the difference between relevant &#8220;genuine&#8221; links and relevant spam links. They have found that their search results are better if they ignore all such links. No doubt they will refine this algorithm in the future.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But, because this is a blog and not another kind of website \u00e2\u20ac\u201d it gets no boost as NoFollow is applied by default. That doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Nofollow does not apply only to blogs. Forums and many other sites that allow reader contributions also use nofollow. Some (like Amazon) don&#8217;t allow links at all. If I review a blogging book on Amazon, and want to mention NoNoFollow, Amazon won&#8217;t let me link to the site at all. Do you consider this unfair too?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>pagerank love (a term created to explain the complex calculation that is pagerank&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The term &#8220;pagerank love&#8221; explains nothing. It has a lovely 1960s caring and sharing vibe about it, which I applaud, but it really doesn&#8217;t give much insight into the &#8220;complex calculation&#8221; that Google uses to rank search results.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A blog owner controls all facets of their online website including other people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s comments&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is clearly not true. The reason nofollow exists is that many (most?) blog owners <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> have full control over their blogs. They may be using a blog provider that doesn&#8217;t give them full administration rights; they may simply lack the technical expertise or the time to manage the blog fully; or they may even have abandoned their blog. For these bloggers, it seems worthwhile to indicate that certain links were not created by them, but were contributed by third parties.<\/p>\n<p>If all bloggers controlled every detail of their blog, then blog spam would not be a problem. But they don&#8217;t, and it is. &#8220;As I have argued ad nauseum, it is plainly obvious that nofollow was never intended to stop comment spam&#8221;. Nofollow does not solve the comment spam problem, but it helps negate its effect on search engine results.<\/p>\n<p>There can&#8217;t be any controversy about simply <em>including<\/em> nofollow in a link. <code>rel=\"nofollow\"<\/code> adds potentially useful semantic metadata to HTML markup &#8212; it indicates that a link may not have been reviewed by the website owner. However, many people take issue with the way Google <em>uses<\/em> nofollow. It makes sense for Google to take nofollow into account when calculating rankings &#8212; but they apparently take an &#8220;all-or-nothing&#8221; approach, ignoring any nofollow links completely. They are simply treating all unreviewed blog comments, trackbacks, forum postings and so on as if they were spam.<\/p>\n<p>I suspect later versions of Google&#8217;s algorithms will use nofollow in a more subtle way, reducing the PageRank contribution of nofollow links but not necessarily ignoring them entirely. This will make its inappropriate name even more inappropriate over time.<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s an overly-simplified nutshell version of my views on nofollow:<\/p>\n<p><strong>If you don&#8217;t like nofollow, then turn it off. If you can&#8217;t turn it off, then you&#8217;re not in control of your blog and you should have nofollow turned on anyway.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote recently about why the worst thing about nofollow is its name. My response to Maxpower&#8217;s thought-provoking comment grew too long for the comments section, so here&#8217;s a slightly longer exposition of what&#8217;s wrong and right with nofollow. First, for avoidance of doubt, here are some of my main points. Nofollow does not reduce [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-web-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}