A large number of websites, search engines, and web software packages are using the the rel=”nofollow” tag on links to external sites. For those who don’t know what this is all about, and you should, it essentially means that Google will not give pagerank to the destination site. Pagerank, or the equivalent on other search engines, helps build a sites authority and popularity in the search engine results pages. The basic concept is that uncontrolled websites (wikis, forums) or part of websites (comments pages, guest books) are often attacked by spammers and their spambot software to try and get as many people to their site as possible. Linking to bad domains (spam sites, malware/virus infected sites) is not good for your websites reputation with the search engines. So the nofollow concept absolves you of responsibility if links appear to websites you don’t endorse or have not personally checked. Ok, so that is the pro’s.
The con’s are that passing pagerank between sites is the best way to build reputation and gain authority in the search engines. And placing in the top 10 (preferably top 3) search engine results is really the holy grail of search engine optimization (and of course, most people want their site at number 1 position for their chosen keywords or phrases – a difficult task for popular niches). If a contributor to your site adds something of worth and leaves a link to their own site or a relevant website that “adds value” to your own content, why shouldn’t they be rewarded with some pagerank juice?
The solution is to automatically nofollow uncontrolled or unsolicited content such as blog comments and then to manually remove the nofollow attribute once you have reviewed a post. I am a big fan of profollow/dofollow links, and have installed the NoFollow Case By Case plugin for WordPress. Anyone who comments on my articles and adds something of value (over and above the “nice blog, check out my site” type of comments which Akismet generally takes care of automatically) will have the nofollow removed from their comment if they supplied a link to their website or blog. I believe this is the best way to reward people for their thoughtful comments.
I hope that a ProFollow/DoFollow movement builds up, and other bloggers and webmasters start removing the nofollow attribute to useful user generated material.
For more information on NoFollow and ProFollow see the following pages:
- ProFollow entry on the AboutUs.org web directory, and their article How to improve AboutUs pages
- nofollow entry on Wikipedia
- About rel=”nofollow” on the Google Webmaster tools site
- Nofollow on MediaWiki’s Meta site
