Nofollow really took off in the blogging community as a means to stop comment spammers and I think at this point it’s safe to say that it’s had absolutely no effect on that front. What’s worse is that it’s the wrong approach to prevent spam as it punishes readers who leave insightful comments or trackbacks by withholding the link value they get in exchange for participating. If someone is willing to take the time to leave a comment we should be more than happy to give them the link value. The only thing nofollow does effectively is hurt the pagerank of active blog participants which was never the desired effect! For comment spam we need to stick with less draconian approaches like Akismet and Captcha.
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I live in San Francisco and am the Co-Founder of Two Bit Labs where we develop iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile apps for our clients. I love the mix of team leadership and working as a hands-on contributor. My technical passions include Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, Cloud Computing, and open-source software.
I also love to sail and my wife, daughter, and I sailed out the Golden Gate in 2007 on our 38 foot Hans Christian cutter (sailboat) on a 3 year cruise. Read about it at http://sailsugata.com.
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Pingback: Vinny Carpenter’s blog » Daily Del.icio.us for Feb 04, 2006
I with you absolutely agree.
I badly speak in English, but now by this paragraph
I shall prove, that No Follow should not be used
It seems that this is how blogs grow. The inter-linking that goes on between bloggers posting comments on each others blogs. I think some of the big bloggers who have benefited from such linking in the past are now useing the nofollow tag.
I posted a comment back in June, but I think it’s interesting that this post has move up to a PageRank 5. It seems that sharing the link love has help this blog get some backlinks. It’s also interesting that there is no spam. So spam can be managed without the use of the nofollow tag!
I have to agree with you on this one, I removed the rel=’nofollow’ bits from my blogs URLs because otherwise people just aren’t going to want to reply. Also it doesn’t really prevent blogspamming so there is no point anyway.
I totally agree with you.
Unlike Standard Warfare comment, I do believe it has greatly reduce the number of spams but it has greatly penalized the new bloggers who are trying to reach out.
I have removed it from my blog also.
well, of course you still have no follow on 😉
but captcha’s an nofollow turn me off from postin most of the time.
why can gmail and yahoo mail filter out 99% of the spam, seems like if they wanted to remove comment spam they would give bloggers an API to there spam filiters for mail, but instead to comments.
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