Thread: rel = No follow, Is there any use of this tag??

When Google first introduced this tag, Bloggers were happy to see a initiative against Spam. Not only bloggers but many sites, such as social bookmarking sites, Wikipedia have adopted this tag..

But somehow I find myself asking, is it worthwhile? is there any use of this tag?
Spam in blogs are now worst than ever, Spam in wikipedia is not going to stop even after use of no follow. So when nofolllow is not serving the cause it was intended to serve, Whats the point of using it?

My own experience says, neither Yahoo nor MSN respect this tag.. I have done experiments with no follow.

I made 4 pages, then Linked A to B and C to D
on page A I used no follow, while on Page C I used Robots Tag with no follow attribute.

A week later Page B was indexed in both Yahoo and MSN but Page D was nowhere to found in SERP.

Conclusion: While search engine still respect Robots tag, they(Except Google) give a damn to no follow.

So I dont see any point of using no follow at all.. Many bloggers agree to me and they started forcing link follow by using plugins like dofollow..

One of the biggest SEO blog "Search Engine Journal" has given up nofollow recently..

What do you guys think??

I think it's a tag that 'could' have been good. Unfortunately the same spammers who it was put into place to stop can and have used it to their advantage. AKA no follow tags on links there should not be no follow tags on.

I use it on all my affiliate links and it makes a difference in being tagged as affiliate spam or listed in my experience. I learned the hard way.

Originally Posted by grim

I think it's a tag that 'could' have been good. Unfortunately the same spammers who it was put into place to stop can and have used it to their advantage. AKA no follow tags on links there should not be no follow tags on.

Yepp thats the point, It could have, but its not.
The intention was good, the initiative was good, but somehow it didnt serve the purpose..

Originally Posted by noppid

I use it on all my affiliate links and it makes a difference in being tagged as affiliate spam or listed in my experience. I learned the hard way.

May be, but if you look on a broader side, no follow is totaly failed to lessen the spam, let alone stopping it..

I don't understand what "lessen spam" means.

Are you saying any attempt to sell is spam?

Originally Posted by noppid

Are you saying any attempt to sell is spam?

Nope.
Do you blog ??

Originally Posted by The Webmaster

Nope.
Do you blog ??

No, do you have a tip?

I'm not sure I understand the spam thing. Is it to do with blogs? I'm trying to get on the same page as you.

Originally Posted by noppid

No, do you have a tip?

I'm not sure I understand the spam thing. Is it to do with blogs? I'm trying to get on the same page as you.

People (read spammers) use blog comments, website guest books, forums posts, to spam their sites, often it would be cheap softwares, Viagra, and something like that.. there are automated softwares available that posts in blogs comment and other similar public communication areas.

Now it was main reason google introduced no follow relation of the links, to get rid of spammers. But if you look at now, it is getting worse.

and since no follow doesnt have a global acceptance (Since no other SE respect this tag except google) it is not really helping..
Even if you put no follow on links, yahoo, MSN etc will follow the link and index the page... Thus rendering it useless..

I find that problem and the tag issue mutually exclusive.

Even if the tag was universal across the engines, spam would not stop.

Nothing will stop spam on blogs and forums except moderation. Ever.

My problem with the no follow tag is it penalizes the few good comments that come in. If someone is nice enough comment on my blog, their link should "count" for the search engines.

Spam is never going to stop it's the e(lectrontic) version of bulk mail it's just a helluva lot cheaper, pretty much free for spammers.

Originally Posted by The Webmaster

People (read spammers) use blog comments, website guest books, forums posts, to spam their sites, often it would be cheap softwares, Viagra, and something like that.. there are automated softwares available that posts in blogs comment and other similar public communication areas.

Now it was main reason google introduced no follow relation of the links, to get rid of spammers. But if you look at now, it is getting worse.

and since no follow doesnt have a global acceptance (Since no other SE respect this tag except google) it is not really helping..
Even if you put no follow on links, yahoo, MSN etc will follow the link and index the page... Thus rendering it useless..

Most spammers just want the traffic in hopes a sale is made, with that being said, "nofollow" won't pass PR, but it will be seen by humans, who may then click it and maybe buy something.

I can understand activating it though cause many who aren't selling something, will make a short stupid comment to get their link on the page to get PR to pass through, it happens on my blog themes site all day. Normally I will manually remove stupid useless two word comments, or their url if it's obviously just spam.

Originally Posted by Kalina

Most spammers just want the traffic in hopes a sale is made, with that being said, "nofollow" won't pass PR, but it will be seen by humans, who may then click it and maybe buy something.

I can understand activating it though cause many who aren't selling something, will make a short stupid comment to get their link on the page to get PR to pass through, it happens on my blog themes site all day. Normally I will manually remove stupid useless two word comments, or their url if it's obviously just spam.

Yes.. and that is what I am saying.. no follow is not serving any purpose.. no matter you use them or not spammers are going to hit your blogs/sites.
If you want to keep your site clean, you have to manually delete/edit them..
On the other hand, If someone spend time to post a comment in my blog with a quality site, I dont see any reason that his link shouldnt be followed. Thus I have decided to remove no follow from my blogs..

Yes, there is a very important use for the rel="nofollow" attribute.

Certain people are using paid links to manipulate PageRank. By buying links that carry weight people can increase their PR without any work. If you have enough wedge it's extremely easy to create pages that carry a high PageRank with very little effort. This whole process of buying links to increase PR makes the PageRank algorithm useless.

A link is essentially a vote. Buying these votes is increasing your rank artificially. It's cheating and Google can not allow this as it affects the quality of their search results.

Matt Cutts has actually talked about this himself.

You can still buy links. As long as the links do not count as votes there is no problem. This is where the rel="nofollow" attribute comes in. It simply instructs search engines that the link shouldn't be considered as a vote and that it shouldn't carry any weight.

- Matt

Yes I agree & many of the link brokers are using the rel=nofollow so that the link juice is not passed & u remain safe from the penalty by Google.

I have used them and they work ok, but I prefer just to let people have the link power. They like you better anyhow

I have used same type meta tag.

Originally Posted by elena1234

I have used same type meta tag.

Sorry do not understand , clear it plz

The rel=”nofollow” attribute is an easy way for a website to tell search engines that the website can’t or doesn’t want to vouch for a link. The best-known use for nofollow is blog comment spam, but the mechanism is completely general. Nofollow is recommended anywhere that links can’t be vouched for. If your logs analysis program shows referrers as hyperlinks, I’d recommend using nofollow on those links. If you have a wiki that anyone on the web can edit, I’d recommend nofollow on those links until you can find a way to trust those links. In general, if you have an application that allows others to add links, web spammers will eventually find your pages and start annoying you.

the use of rel="nofollow" is to reduce your outbound links. nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

I thought rel no follow has no use it pagerank especially in google? But come to think of it I think Google is counting it as well its just that we just dont know google rules when it comes to PR

I believe Yahoo counts the no follow the same as do follow, isn't this correct?

The problem is that Google has introduced this tag and has taken measures for not taken them into account while counting link popularity of a site. But yahoo and Bing have not taken any initiative to support this and this is the reason why these two sites are continuously flooded by spam attacks and this is not showing any sign of slowdown.

Originally Posted by melovemoney

I believe Yahoo counts the no follow the same as do follow, isn't this correct?

Yahoo counts no-follow as no-follow and do-follow as do-follow. Only it gives importance to every link so it treat both as links and give importance...

Hi,

The no follow tag can be goiod to use on your own site so that you keep the power or link juice for your own internal links or links relevant to your business.

Example would be a helpful links page where you place links to services that compliment your website, this is a service to your visitors and really you shouldnt loose because you're being considerate. So put no follow tags on these links then your own links on that page will not loose any weight.

Hope that makes sense.

Cheers

Pete