I was interested in trying to do some research on the future of the rel="nofollow" tag and tried finding some good info about the future of the nofollow tag. However, it was kind of difficult to find reputable information about this topic via search engines. I don't know if very many people have written about the near future of the element. I did find a few good sources discussing pros and cons - http://alexander.holbreich.org/2007/02/nofollow-considered-harmful/ http://www.theminorityreport.org/2009/dofollow-links-vs-nofollow-links/ I was thinking this might be a good thread for people to share their insight on the future of nofollow tags. Why am I interested? I was just thinking about how it seems to me that rankings should majorly be determined by casual bloggers and internet forum users, (Everyday People Basically) to determine rankings. I feel like nofollow tags make it alot easier for old money, large sites, and clever manipulative webmasters to determine search rankings. I know that spam is a big issue but i'm not real sure if nofollow tags really prevent spam. Maybe someone here with more knowledge can talk about that. Anyways, please discuss what you think the future of nofollow tags, possible future implementations of technology that make them obsolete, other relevant info, etc.
Most webmaster use no-follow tags to prevent spamming. But nowadays bloggers are converting their no-follow tags to do-follow. I think most blogger will remove their no-follow tags in future.
Thanks for the reply, im hoping for more descriptive discussion though with theories, references, etc. because i found it hard to find detailed info about the future of nofollow tags and future alternative spam prevention methods via google.
I do believe that Googles gives some importance to no follow links in their calculation for serp positions.
The fact is that the nofollow value (it's not a tag actually) indicates that factors determining pr are not transferred to the link marked with the value. I have read that these links are not ignored and can still cause unfavorable consequences. As to the future of nofollow, I'm afraid I posses enough the knowledge to make any claims about that... And it seems unlikely that someone here would be able to reliably predict developments of this kind.
Surely someone on this forum has ran across good discussions or articles or has knowledge or has wandered about the future of nofollow and ranking determinations.
In my point of view nofollow is on fade out. No matter what Google plan at the beginning, its so obvious that it has being a massive failure and push the web to be a mess like never before. Most authority sites uses nofollow even for legit links, and even them are using dofollow only for SEO purpouses. Result? A big mess. And of course the first to notice it should be Google. In fact, they as being so slow to go back into the right direction. Which is the right direction? One in which the observer do not distort that much what its being observed. Google on its attempt to find which site is more relevant and with more authority, based on incoming links, has pushed a big quantity of "noise" and now its impossible to determine which nofollow are being used on legit links and which are really only protecting the PR of the website. So, nofollow is a headache and i magine that Google will start ignoring it sooner or later.
Just like everything else, spammers will find a way to get around nofollow, so I do think the future of nofollow is limited and search engines (and webmasters) will have to find another way to rank for SERP
I agree with alot of what you're saying. I believe nofollow allows more manipulation of the serps because most webmasters use nofollow on what they simply don't want to give any credit to and then neglect the tag for reasons they then stand to gain from. Also the fact that nofollow is so standard now on many installations. It allows some blogs and forums to constantly reference actual news articles and pages and such without giving any link juice....and its like, oh...well, its my default installation, or "I'm just avoiding spam"...so its now more easy to create a page on specific subject matter and use alot of references for that topic, but get lots of traffic from serps to your page over the references because you didn't give the references the link juice.
The # of dofollow blogs vs the default nofollow are still pretty small which makes dofollow challenging but very valuable.
Although I do admit it is not fully effective, at least it offers some level of control to deter spamming since it doesn't pass on the page rank.
theres plenty of threads on this forum talking about spammin and not fully effectiveness, this thread is supposed to be for discussion about future alternative methods and such.