rel=”nofollow”
By now, you’ve surely heard about the announcement. Google (and other leading search engines) will now respect a new attribute to hyperlinks. There has been a deluge of comment, both pro and con. Phil Ringnalda has a nice list of links in his piece. I’m too lazy to add more links, but I bet you know how you could find some.
I also don’t think I have anything clever or original to add to the discussion, but want to explain what we’re doing here at Musings and why.
Previously, you could tell a search engine spider that the links on an entire page are not to be followed by adding a
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />
to the <head> of the page. Now you have more fine-grained control. You can write
<a href="..." rel="nofollow">
on the level of individual hyperlinks.
To understand what this is all about, let’s step back a moment. When you do a search for “X,” the search engine attempts to return to you the most relevant hits about “X.” To determine what’s relevant, Google harnesses the collective wisdom of web authors: if lots of them link to something, it must be important. The flaw is in the notion of “web author.” With the advent of guestbooks, wikis and, most importantly, blogs, the distinction between “surfers” and “authors” got blurred. Suddenly, visitors could add their own links to your site. Inevitably, some of those visitors turn out to be robots hawking Viagra and porn sites.
So now we have a way to tell the Googlebot, “These links are important, but those links don’t count.” The theory is that weblog software vendors will programmatically add this attribute to links in comments and trackbacks. It’s not clear whether this will change the incentive structure for comment-spammers, or change it in the direction we want. And it has other problems.
- Nothing restricts
rel="nofollow"to its intended use: links added by visitors to your site. Instead, it’s yet another tool in the hands of those interested in gaming the system and manipulating the PageRanks of their own sites versus those of their competitors. Self-important jerks are positively gleeful at the thought of diddling with the PageRanks of the sites they link to. SEO “experts” are, I’m sure, licking their chops, too. - If used as intended, links in comment text will be automatically tagged with
rel="nofollow". The whole point of allowing comments in the first place was that they are often insightful — sometimes moreso than the original post — and hence the links therein are relevant to the topic at hand, and should be followed.
If I’ve gone to the trouble of eliminating robotic comment spammers, what’s left are my “real” commenters, and a trickle of easily-dealt-with manual spammers. The latter have taken the approach of trying to “blend in,” offering relevant-sounding comments, and saving their spammish URLs for the Commenter-URL link.
The Commenter-URL link was never really relevant to the topic at hand. At best, it’s relevant to the link-text (your name). But, in most circumstances, the resulting boost in PageRank leads only to bizarre effects. With or without the boost from the Commenter-URL link, no one should ever have trouble finding your blog. So, whereas I’m reluctant to add rel="nofollow" to the links in the body of your comment, I have little compunction about automatically adding a rel="nofollow" to your Commenter-URL link.
Trackback-URL links are a place where I am totally defenceless against spam. There, I really feel that the best available defence is to defang them with a rel="nofollow". If you really have linked to one of my posts, you will automatically get a link back on my sidebar, thanks to Technorati. Since the link appears both on my main page and on all my monthly archive pages, that’s much more Googlejuice than you “lost” when I added a rel="nofollow" to the Trackback-URL link on the individual archive page.
So, in summary, Commenter-URL and Trackback-URL links get rel="nofollow" added to them. The links in the body of your comments do not. I think that strikes the desired balance between quashing spam and respecting the value that commenters bring to these pages.
Update (2/5/2005):
I’ve tweaked this policy a bit. If you PGP-sign your comment, then it does not getrel="nofollow"ed.
Re: rel=”nofollow”
I’m currently beta testing some code on my blog for dealing with trackback spam: An Automatic Solution to Referral / Track-Back Spam.
You can see the automatically moderated trackbacks here.
So far, so good :-)