What do you think about the widespread use of nofollow?

I think it's being used way beyond it's intended purpose now (which was to mark links that haven't been reviewed by the website editor).

If a blog owner actually reviews each comment manually & chooses to publish it, why not give the commenter the link love?

 

It is abundantly abused. In part this is because Google tried to expand upon its original use (paid links and such) and in part because of webmaster greed.

Just say no to nofollow

 

Since Google no longer honors the orignal use of nofollow and deletes the PR/link benefit it used to protect no one should use it at all. Since the link benefit is now deleted what's the gain in using it?

I use WordPress a lot and it's filled with nofollow links, been replacing them with form posts which Google does not treat as a link.

Pain in the butt, nofollow was perfect for affiliate links, login links etc...

David Law

 

Yeah it's sickening to see all the major web publishing software like wordpress, mediawiki, forums etc nofollowing every freaking link. I don't get this herd mentality of lynching "spammers". How is it spam if it's related to the niche & people find it useful enough not to delete it? (Again, this applies for websites WITH frequent editorial review)

This tacitly encourages paid links, because a lot of webmasters these days will only give you a "dofollow" link if you pay for it!

Kind of reminds me of the uptight policies of webhostingtalk.com where they might ban you for posting in a thread for supposed "signature spam".

 

It would have been better if WordPress had the built in option to choose if a comment link was nofollow or not, so when a good comment is made reward the commenter with a link. Unfortunately as it is now if you dofollow links on WordPress (I have over 50 WordPress installations) you get a lot of very poor quality manual comment spam (the generic great post about X comments) on top of the thousands of automated spammed comments.

On my WordPress sites I stopped commenters from even adding their link and it stopped a lot of poor quality comments without having a negative impact on good comments. Have pages with hundreds of comments with no links out.

Since nofollow is no longer useful I'm converting the themes I use to use post forms for comment links and again allowing commenters to link to their sites (the links are invidible to search engines). I would like the option to allow some links through, but my PHP skills aren't up to the challenge.

WordPress development has added a new feature (Reply to individual comments) which can result in 100+ nofollow links on a heavily commented page. Because nofollow now kills PR this can pretty much destroy the link benefit flowing through a site! Been trying to get them to change it for months with no joy!

I've gone from loving nofollow to hating it!

I do like how PHPBB forum software has a ifbot tag, you can hide the links (loning links, profile links etc...) altogether from Google etc... then, no need for nofollow with PHPBB.

David Law

 

If all comments are manually reviewed before being published, there's no reason at all for any commenter's link to be nofollowed.

 

nofollow is whored out. even legitimate links created by site owners are being nofollowed in an effort to preserve their PR. This may have once been a good strategy to combat spam, but now it is just a waste. Time for Google to figure something else out, and who knows maybe that is what this caffeine update is all about.

 

A lot of bloggers not aware of nofollow and started using blogging. The sudden increase of nofollow blogs probably because many bloggers that joined blogging newly and not aware of this issue. By default, wordpress and blogspot blogs are nofollow. So, only those who really understand the concept of dofollow will find plugins or ways to give dofollow.

I'm a big fan of dofollow and already been more than a year supporting my dofollow blog. It is always rewarding to provide some link juice to our commentators.

 

Reviewing the comment is one thing, vouching for the link is another. How many blog owners manually check the link to make sure they're not linking out to a bad neighborhood?

 

Some bloggers support "U comment I Follow" that makes blog comments dofollow.

 

Well, you have spammers to thank for that. Most software developers are just very paranoid and do this as a safeguard.

 

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

 

Actually, I think most of the nofollow abuse is webmasters trying to "conserver" page rank - something it was never intended for.

Shucks, I've seen recip link requests where the offered link was on a page where everything was nofollowed. That is just wrong.

 

its mostly website owners trying to prevent spammers

 

"Since"? I don't know about that. I have badbot traps on some of my websites, and some of the links use "nofollow" to traps that link to another website. I log anything/anyone that follows the link. Since Google very rarely follows my nofollow links (compared to the rest of the links on the page), it appears that Google honors the use of nofollow.

I suspect that the use of nofollow has become so liberal that Google became concerned that it would limit the pages that were indexed. So, they sometimes (rarely) follow a nofollow link just to see if anything is really there, but the link destination gets absolutely no additional SEO or PageRank juice whatsoever.

Since it's always better to run your own experiments, I trust my results.

It's pretty obvious that people that engage in comment spam want to discourage webmasters from using nofollow.

Since nofollow helps prevent comment spam, I use it always.

 

Lets say you have a forum, or some type of social site, making links nofollow can really cut down on the spam.

 

That's what one of the original intentions was. The point is, when you can set your comment approval to manual mode, why don't you just kick out those spamming links? Or why do you think the "You comment, I follow" movement is growing?

 

I agree about the link love, well this is commonly used at the the
commenting system commentluv, well there are so many bloggers there
that will give you backlink as long as you are participating properly
on their blogs

 

Because you are creating a great deal more work for yourself.

BY DEFAULT, my comment links are nofollow. I can choose to remove nofollow on any individual link.

Hey, if a spammer looks at your source and is unhappy to discover that your comment links are nofollow, and/or you openly state that your comment links are nofollow, in my own experiments I've watched the amount of comment spam drops faster than Charlie Sheen's boxers in a whorehouse.

 

What works even better is to disallow html tags in any post, and to not even offer the opportunity for a personal URL.

And, it doesn't even require the use of proprietary attributes like nofollow.

If you really want to save yourself work you can set up a bot trap that rewrites you .htaccess on the fly. Catch those automated spammers and block them once and for all without ever raising a finger.