The ups and downs of "nofollow"
There’s been a lot of hubbub lately about the announcement from SixApart and Google as well as other blog world application makers related to the
rel=“nofollow”variable. While this won’t stop comment spam immediately (Jay Allen’s MT Blacklist has saved this blog’s comment space), this optional tag will help reduce the effect of leveraging legitimate site’s page rank and linking benefits for FREE TEXAS HOLD-EM POKER!!! sites and their ilk.
No incentive, no dice.
I personally like to help people with their google ranking (as much as it can matter in a personal weblog) and so I leave my comments open. I do, however, religiously purge spammers. For those of you without that crusader mentality, this might be your best bet.
The din seems to be coming from people who, while using LiveJournal or other sites, have been forced to have all links use this, or from people who feel that this is a completely backwards useless waste of time (insert excessive complaining over numerous web log pages). You can read the trackbacks on Six Apart’s ProNet Introduction to Nofollow and see the variety of comments on this.
Basically, it’s not going to save us immediately. You’re still going to be purging spam, but if there’s no benefit from spamming you, then why would anyone take the time to do so?
January 26, 2005 at 12:54 PM
Sounds good to me. A couple of my friends' blogs were nearly useless for weeks thanks to spammin' jerks. The more programming-savvy of the two fixed it herself by requiring commenters to insert a randomly-generated number from an image. The other just gave up, which he'd been wanting to do for a while anyway. So far, I have no troubles, though today my peeps are blowing up the comments. Good times.