Nofollow is a failure

Nofollow is a non-standard html tag, proposed by Google, back in 2005. The tag was supposed to stop spamming on search engines by not following spam links. But on the contrary nothing has changed. Spammers are still posting their links in blog comments, forums or social network sites. And this tag proved to be a failure.

How search engines treat nofollow?

Despite of having support for nofollow tag by almost all big search engines, the exact interpretation of the nofollow tag varies from search engine to search engine.

Google takes the literally meaning of nofollow tag and does not follow the tag at all.
Yahoo follows the link but does not count its score for target link’s ranking.
MSN search engine does not count the nofollow link in their ranking.
Surprisingly Ask.com does not care about the attribute at all and treat it as a normal backlink to website or page.

Who is using No follow?

If you want to know if some webpage or site is using nofollow tag, just view the source code of webpage and look for rel=”nofollow” attribute.Since the Google and other search engines announced their support for nofollow attribute many websites and blogs have implemented this tag in their design. Wikipedia.org, Digg.com, Furl.com, Propeller.com, Yahoo, Youtube.com, Searchles.com, Listible.com and Technorati.com are just few social networking websites with nofollow tag against their user-submitted links.Wordpress v1.5 and above automatically assign the nofollow tag to all user generated links. However there are few plugins available that remove the nofollow attribute.

Nofollow can be useful to lessen the risk of Page Rank leakage. Although it was meant to stop spamming only, nofollow tag is great for stop page rank leakage as well. Search engines like Google just do not follow the target link and in the result the page rank does not transfer to the target website or page.

5 reasons why nofollow is a failure

1. Nofollow doesn’t stop spamming. Most of the spammers even don’t know about the tag.
2. Nofollow is confusing. Some search engines follow the target links but don’t let them influence the rankings where some others don’t even follow the links. 
3. Nofollow treat every user as spammer and hurts the relationship between the admin and user.
4. Nofollow isolates the websites from other website and does not allow web to be web.
5. Nofollow discourages even the users from participating (blog comments, forum postings) in the discussion.

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March 25, 2008 | Filed Under Link Building Articles 

Comments

2 Responses to “Nofollow is a failure”

  1. KG Lew on April 8th, 2008 5:34 pm

    No-Follow is still good on high pr pages to get some referral traffic, but it won’t give you any link juice…

  2. John Illnes on April 11th, 2008 7:37 am

    I think the interesting part, google makes this job unknown so we dont know exactly what is happening.. if google is counting or not.. is nofollow links work for someting or not.. so there is always a hope :)

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