Exploring Nofollow
With the Web 2.0 craze, a lot more websites are coming about that depend on the submissions of individual users to function. Whether it be videos (Youtube), targeted links (StumbleUpon), social bookmarking (del.icio.us) or even information (Wikipedia), we are satrting to see something that is unifying the Web 2.0 movement in addition to the obvious: nofollow.
Nofollow, or more correctly rel=nofollow, is a microformat that allows webmasters to specify for search engines not to count links to a site as "votes" for the page. Most of the popular search engines now support this microformat, with the notable exception of Ask. Google ignores nofollow links completly and Yahoo! follows them but gives the referring page no credit. (You can read more about this at the Search Engine Journal) You may be most familar with nofollow from the blog about blogging arena as there has recently been the DoFollow movement for comments.
Unfortunately, what this all boils down to is that it is slowly getting harder to get search engine juice. Even if your page were to be the number one most stumbled page on StumbleUpon, for instance, you would get no search engine juice from them directly. In fact, besides some sites like Propeller and Digg, most social bookmarking sites use nofollow now. All this has led to is these websites gaining huge pageranks and keeping it to themselves for this most part.
If you would to be able to see when a see when a link is not followed at a glance, then you are in luck if you use Mozilla Firefox. The SearchStatus extension, which also gives Alexa rank and Pagerank for pages as you visit them, includes a feature I just noticed a few weeks ago. If you right click on its icon in the status bar, assuming it is installed, you can then click to Highlight Nofollow Links. This will allow you to see nofollow links rather easily as you browse, or as you are in a web development profile if you prefer.
I personally don't feel too strongly about nofollow in some places, such as blog comments, but it bothers me to see it on sites like Wikipedia. What are your thoughts? Do you think search engines should stop supporting it all together?
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It's a great way to fight spam. If spammers get no search rank improvement, they'll get nothing out of their spam.
I rather have rel=nofollow then not, on site i use. It definitely decrease spam.
Wikipedia for one, often got hole pages deleted and replaced by spam, but now it's pointless for the spammers, as they won't get anything out of it.
Of course, Wikipedia still get spammed, but it won't help the spammers…
It's a must for all CMCs, as they'll get targeted by spammers, if it increase they search rank.
@GoldenGnu: In the blogging world, bots don't even check for nofollow it seems. If they support the CMS, then they will spam it. At the last place I hosted Jatecblog I was using nofollow. However, the spamming rate remained constant.
I can see how Wikipedia can be different. Still, I know Wikipedia is developing a lot of great spam bots. If an entire page is replaced, then the spam bots are usually on it instantly.
ohh well, so much for my theory then…
But, I'm still all-in for the nofollow, on pages that contain unedited user input…
If you approve user input before it's published, it doesn't matter. And that's really the way to go, until you reach a certain size…
But for YouTube and other such sites, you have to go with nofollow, IMHO.
I still like the idea, that they won't get higher search ranking, when spamming such site…
@GoldenGnu: Oh, don't get me wrong. On sites such as Youtube I see no problem with nofollow most of the time.
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