Search engines' increasing worries about link spamming have led to calls for various techniques to be employed which will counteract and prevent spammers from attacking blogs, forums and other sites with unwanted links. One technique suggested to prevent this from happening is use of the "nofollow" attribute, which, when attached to a link, tells search engines not to use that link to add to the PageRank score of the target page.

The nofollow attribute is inserted into a hyperlink in the following manner:

[a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.awebsite.com/" rel="nofollow"]A Website[/a]

Many blogging sites, including LiveJournal and Blogger, have implemented a change to their blogging software which automatically inserts rel="nofollow" into any links posted in comments by users who are not "friends" of the blog owner. The idea is that if the link no longer contributes to the page rank of the target page, search engine results will be improved and spammers put off from spamming in the first place.

Nofollow is open to misuse, however. Inexperienced webmasters might decide to put the nofollow attribute on all their outgoing links for nonsensical reasons such as "prevention of page rank leakage" – an imaginary problem. Unfortunately, doing so can harm the rank of their own page, and the quality of their links to others' sites which do not feature the nofollow attribute. Moreover, many have argued that it is neither fair nor friendly to treat outgoing links in this way, and that it undermines the democratic spirit of the web. One blogger writes, "Linking to someone with a NoFollow attribute is a sign of not trusting them. It’s like reaching to shake someone’s hand, but stopping to put on a pair of latex gloves."

Many bloggers in particular are frustrated by the change, arguing that the quality of comments they receive to their blogs has diminished now that the nofollow attribute has been implemented. Plug-ins have been developed which allow blog owners to bypass the nofollow rule and let their visitors get the "link love" they deserve for posting a well-written, content-rich comment. Many have argued that if they are using comment moderation, as many bloggers do, they can manually filter out any spammy comments themselves, and the nofollow attribute is therefore superfluous.

Another response to the move has been that it may help search engines produce better results, but it doesn't put off the spammers, so bloggers are still having to deal with the irritation of spammy comments. Even if the value of a spam link is reduced by the nofollow attribute, it's still possible that blog visitors will see and click the link on the blog. What's more, blanket spamming of hundreds of blogs is so cheap that, it is argued, many spammers won't bother distinguishing between blogs which use nofollow on comments, and those which do not.

Google, Yahoo! and MSN have been respecting the nofollow attribute for the last two years. Some sources claim limited successes, whilst others have argued that the spam problem has only continued to grow. It remains to be seen how the situation will pan out, but criticism of nofollow implementation in many blogs, forums and other user-contributed sites continues to be widespread. Blogs and forums often rely on links and interlinking for their popularity, growth and search engine traffic, and many have accused the initiative of taking steps to "kill the web". Google has subsequently said it is considering using nofollow for another purpose: to label paid links, so that search engines can ignore them.

Remember that nofollow does not exist to prevent search engines from indexing pages of your site. Whilst Google doesn't index pages at the ends of nofollow links, it will still index them if another site links to these pages. Yahoo! and others do index nofollow-linked pages; they just don't use the link itself to contribute to the sites' page ranks. Nofollow is only for preventing them from using the link to add to the target site's ranking. If you have pages on your site which you do not want to be indexed by search engines (such as ebooks or software to which access is restricted), use a robots.txt file.

By Iain Ford

For more information on features of a domain name, pricing of domains, or domain registration questions please feel free to contact Domainmonster.com support team who will be happy to assist you.