The NoFollow Effect
“nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index” (Wikipedia)
So much explains it self. The attribute is part of Google’s efforts to fight blog comment spam which was implemented back in 2005. Ever since then many blog communities have started to adapt this parameter to make it less of use for spammers to gain backlink from the comments. Without ruling out it’s advantages, I have disabled it on my blog as I am filtering out all spam and thus killing the motive behind the attribute it self.
Google’s idea and efforts haven’t been adapted however by other search engines. The least not the big ones. Yahoo for example does not take that parameter into consideration. The net result is huge difference in site results and ranking, for blogs specifically, between Google and Yahoo. Let’s do a small test and see. Say we want to see all pages that link to my blog. This would be accomplished by searching for link:blogallalong.com. See the query applied on Google. 12 results only at the time of writing. Not much hah? I should note however that there are other sites linking in to my blog but for some reason they are not included in the results. Now let’s see the same query on Yahoo. At the time of writing, that’s 1,777 results! BIG DIFFERENCE RIGHT? I should consider defaulting to Yahoo they admire my blog more :).
So what’s that supposed to mean? More links means theoretically higher ranking. Means that when you search for example for Google Checkout Review, which is a post I wrote sometime back and got some good hits, if you search it on Yahoo you should get my post in the results much higher than Google. Initially the post was one of the top on both. When more and more Google Checkout reviews started to come out, mine got pushed back naturally. Surprisingly, even with so many backlinks in Yahoo, if I search the Google Checkout Review as keywords (not phrase) on Google & Yahoo, you will see that Google lists my post at end of 2nd page while I was not able to find my post on Yahoo for the first 6 or 7 pages! Search Engine world is a mystery not meant to be solved. Search the whole phrase and the post will be #6 at Yahoo and #10 at Google at the time of writing. This is because much of the results will be ruled out as we are looking for exact phrase ofcourse.
Now, the two options are available. NoFollow, and the so called DoFollow. Here comes the fun part. Wanna see what you can make with them? Do a link:blogallalong.com again on Google, and you will get mostly the blogs that do not use the NoFollow. You will see that SearchEngineJournal and the legendary Ron Gilbert both don’t use it. HINT: I comment on Ron Gilbert blog! See, you got me there. This won’t work for popular sites like Cnet however, as they have mostly non blog-comment inlinks and the NoFollow effect here is minimal. But what would the same query on Yahoo reveal? It would show you the blogs that I visit and comment on. That’s right. You can track me and see what I’ve been doing. So in a way, Google’s NoFollow respects your privacy more. That’s one more unintended advantage. So maybe we should have a WP plugin to give user option to have NoFollow on his comment or not :).
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Comments
excellent informative post :)
I’ve already installed DoFollow Plug on my blog after reading this ..
3Baid: if you have small number of comments this can be moderated manually , but when the numbers increase and the spam increases it will be a very time consuming process.
3baid: The post is not about how to eliminate spam actually. Just brief intro is given to make sure people understand it. It’s about now what you can get out of NoFollow :)
MrMMM: Thanks
I am using Spam Karma now and so far, I can only remember 1 or 2 times a spam went through. You mark it as spam and it won’t bother you anymore. In a way, I don’t have to know about spam comments anymore.
Try it. It’s a must I’d say. I am not moderating comments prior to posting now.
That’s very interesting!
And I can vouch for Spam Karma 2. The counter says: 12443 Spams eaten and counting! It’s absolutely wonderful.
Simply put: there’s no easy way to eliminate spam. My advice would be to moderate all links by default and let regular comments post immediately.