Do You Follow the Nofollow? Get the Story – and The Linkjuice!
The dofollow – nofollow debate has been a topic that was beaten into the dirt… Here’s a little rerun of some of the story.
Issue:
The concept of Google’s page-rank algorithm is based on the structure used to rank the authority of academic articles. The assumption is that any academic article that is quoted by other sites is more authoritative. Google applies that to websites, and assumes that the more links coming in to a site, the more relevant it is to the keywords that it’s linked into with.
Say What?
Mark Cook over at Digerati Marketing compares the internet to a flower show.
We’re at a flower show and everyone has put their flowers (websites) out on display. The flower judge (Google) is going to come along and rank these flowers in order of how big and well developed they are. Unfortunately, our judge is blind. So he can’t tell how beautiful the flowers are, only how big they are.
However, our judge can still judge the show, because he has a clever way of working out how beautiful the flowers are as well. Since this is a kind of weird flower show, there are some extra rules. Everyone with flowers is allowed to take some of their flower food and give it to what they think are the beautiful flowers in the show to help them grow some more.
Naturally, the biggest and most beautiful flowers attract the most food and grow even quicker. However, there are also some small flowers with really nice, um buds on them that attract a few people so they get a nice boost too. So the flower judge goes around and ranks the best flowers as he sees (hawhaw) fit and takes notes on how well everyone is doing.
He sees some really bad flowers too, seriously, they’re like f**king twigs and nobody has fed them at all. Since the flower show as over 100 billion flowers in it, the judge really never gets a rest. He kind of does laps constantly re-ranking flowers, getting minimum wage in his never ending job. So when we get back to our first group of flowers again, everyone has been working hard on growing them.
Poor old twig man’s flower is still looking as crap as ever. So twig man walks around the field before the show and picks up all the flower food he can find that other people have dropped. This flower food is a bit rotten, but it’s certainly better than nothing. The food makes his flower grow a lot bigger, but not all that beautiful. “That’s okay” he thinks, “The judge is blind, he can’t see my flower isn’t beautiful and I’ll be sure to win!”.
When re-ranking the flowers, the judge comes twig man’s flower and has a feel and thinks “Well, this has certainly grown quickly compared to the other 100,000,000,000 flowers in the show. It must be quite a beautiful flower, I’ll rank him a bit higher”. Twig man is dead chuffed and his flower gets 10th position in his flower niche.
Before the judge comes around again, twig man sets off to find more dropped flower food. Crap! There’s nowhere near as much as last time and what is left is really rotten! Still, nobody is feeding twig man’s plant for him, even though it’s a big plant, it’s an ugly plant. So twig man feeds his plant what bits of rotten food he can.
When the judge finally returns and examines twig man’s plant again, he thinks “That’s strange. This plant had grown a lot last time I saw it. Now it has hardly grown at all. Almost all of the other plants, when they start to bloom, grow faster month on month. I think this man is cheating”.
…and so twig man of course loses his place in the flower show…
Back to the analogy – paid links are like “twig man” making his own “rotten” flower food, so that the flower feels big – but it’s still ugly.
In short, this is what Google is trying to do with the nofollow tag.
Nofollow Link History
In 2005 Google introduced the “Nofollow tag” to prevent comment spam from getting any credit. As you can see on their post, other search engines and blogging platforms implemented the nofollow tag immediately. (Although Wordpress seems to have waited until the release of version 2.3 to set nofollow as a default).
Recently, Google started using the nofollow tag for paid links as well, penalizing site-owners who had paid links on their site that don’t have the nofollow tag.
In addition, they introduced a controversial method of reporting paid links to them. (Remember when kindergarten when we used to call the kids that kissed ass “tattle tales”?)
Arguments for Nofollow:
The obvious purpose is to keep the “page-rank” algorithm relevant – by removing any paid links, and reducing rankings from comment spam.
Webmasters Issues with Nofollow:
(Taken from Wikipedia)
Some weblog authors object to the use of rel="nofollow", arguing, for example,[19][20] that
- Link spammers will continue to spam everyone to reach the sites that do not use
rel="nofollow" - Link spammers will continue to place links for clicking (by surfers), even if those links are ignored by search engines.
- Google is advocating the use of
rel="nofollow"in order to reduce the effect of heavy inter-blog linking on page ranking. - According to the statistics shown at the Akismet’s antispam service, this tag has not stopped the comment spam and has not discouraged spammers.
- Lack of accreditation may discourage informational comments by professionals wishing to establish their PageRankreputation.
My Rebuttal:
- Link spammers will continue to spam everyone to reach the sites that do not use
rel="nofollow"- Link spammers will continue to place links for clicking (by surfers), even if those links are ignored by search engines.
- According to the statistics shown at the Akismet’s antispam service, this tag has not stopped the comment spam and has not discouraged spammers.
Google’s only goal is to make their search engine useful – which means relevant results. Therefore they need to make sure that comment spam doesn’t affect the search rankings. It’s not about cleaning up blogs from spammers.
Google is advocating the use of rel=”nofollow” in order to reduce the effect of heavy inter-blog linking on page ranking.
Soo what? It’s their search engine and their rules… This just goes back to the crybabies who want Google to make their business for them. Go ahead, use your brains – and find other ways to market your business.
The Real Problems with Nofollow:
5. Lack of accreditation may discourage informational comments by professionals wishing to establish their PageRank
I think that this a very relevant point. Moreso, when I create content on a different site, I am helping them create content / value for their users and advertisers. That should validate / count for a vote towards my own content I link to… Does Google suggest that we nofollow all forum signature links as well? Don’t the forum moderators moderate that as well? Wouldn’t it be more relevant to expect a blog owner to police their own blog? (I sure as hell do.)
So we have a problem with the nofollow tag on blogs.
The paid links “nofollow tag” however, is much more problematic than the blog “nofollow”. The blog commenting “nofollow” is optional. The paid links is required – or you lose rankings on the search engine.
Andy Beard doesn’t like that. His argument is that
Paid Reviews can also add Value?
He’s also committed to still doing paid reviews, so he has a little sneaky way to give his advertisers value… check his article at: “Lowering The Google Red Flag – Sidestep The Cash Hungry Bull“. It’s a great read!
Remembering the flower show, we know that Googlebot has a problem figuring out what is relevant content – the beautiful flowers… so I don’t know a better solution.
Bottom line: Is Nofollow Good or Bad for One Man Show Businesses?
Looking at Matt Cutt’s blog – you find alot of “one man show businesses” really pissed that they are losing revenue, getting slapped etc. As I said, alot of them are crybabies. (Graywolf has some great points though!)
Bottom line is that Black Hat SEO’s cheat people that are creating quality content out of their “fair rankings” (which there is no such thing obviously). Additionally, when you can “guarantee quick results” who do you think pays the premium? Not small business owner person (unless s/he is a blackhat SEO themself), they can’t afford it. It’s the small / medium / gigantic companies that are cheating.
Bottom line – removing the value of paid links from Google’s algorithm will benefit everyone who wants to “play fair”.
That’s the theory – the real question is the implementation – and I’m not happy with some of the solutions that are being used – like ruining link juice from many social sites and blogs randomly. I think it damages the algorithm more than it helps it.
Nofollow Solutions I like:
Plugins
First, let’s steal from Andy Beard again 
Check out his original post with dofollow and nofollow plugins here:
- Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin – I was going to liken this plugin to a Ferrari, because it is built to be fast, but it is probably more like a Subaru, not just fast but designed for rugged terrain and can handle the twists and turns of comment spammers without slowing down.
- DoFollow – many look on this as the granddaddy of NoFollow plugins – you just switch it on and it works, all nofollows are removed from comments and trackbacks.
- Dofollow (WP Plugin) – Sometimes I wish this one has been given a better more descriptive name. It includes the ability (optional) to remove nofollow from comments after a period of time.
- Link Love – this is a brand new plugin that removes nofollow after a certain number of comments have been made – this rewards regular commenters – one thing I like is that the detection is based upon email address and not domain or URL, so it allows a commenter to spread the links how they like.
- GoodLinks – This plugin looks extremely useful for many people who have layout problems when people post long URLs – it also removes NoFollow as an option
- Remove Nofollow – Cristian Mezi from SeoPedia’s plugin – I am not sure of the history or features, but it is probably similar to the original DoFollow plugin.
- NoNofollow – Including this link for historical reasons – Bronski’s plugin doesn’t work with newer versions of Wordpress, but credit where credit is due.
- WP-Nofollow – Again included for historical reasons – one of the first plugins for WP 1.2 based on the original MT plugin code
Blog Commenting Aggregation / Reputation Sites:
As far as I know, the below blog aggregating sites don’t really address the nofollow issue directly. For example, they don’t deactivate the nofollow plugin. However, they have potential to reward frequent commenters with more authority… (Their real goal is to allow commenters to track their comments over multiple networks etc. and make it easier to create more interaction.)
I’d like to see these types of networks solve the nofollow problem (at least on blogs) by automatically allowing trusted members to have the nofollow link removed. (Although that also allows for abuse – but it makes the level of entry higher).
Check out this post on Mashable about the 3 services.
Misc. Dofollow Resources
1. Courtesy of Courtney Tuttle (and Colleen?) – List of Do-follow blogs
2. Andy Beard’s Bumpzee Nofollow list
3. Coming soon…
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Comments
Great informative post. I had heard of no follow but wasn’t really aware what it was about. I’d watch out citing wikipedia though, make sure that the information you get is from a credible source.
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