Since its enthusiastic adoption a year and a half ago, by Google, Six Apart, Wordpress, and of course the eminent Dave Winer, I think we can all agree that nofollow has done … nothing. Comment spam? Thicker than ever. It’s had absolutely no effect on the volume of spam. That’s probably because comment spammers don’t give a crap, because the marginal cost of spamming is so low. Also, nofollow-tagged links are still links, which means that humans can still click on them–and if humans can click, there’s a chance somebody might visit the linked sites after all.
I of course hate being the obnoxious asshole shouting ‘I fucking told you so!’ (that’s not true), still… I told you so.
I’ll join in on this rant! I told you so… but hey, what do I know? I’m only a WordPress user :^p
Agreed.
Yes indeed – google’s answer to fixing page rank was to break inter-blog linking via comments.
I still remember the fervour that surrounded it’s initiation – and I still remember being surprised that someone as savvy as Matt ‘Mr Wordpress’ Mullenweg (amoung many many others) were sucked in by it..
The amusing thing is that now pro no-follow denizens declare it was never about spam prevention.
Oh well. :)
Hur, I even commented in your original post to the same effect of “it’s a band aid and won’t work”.
Thought so.
I thought the idea was to penalize the comment spammers by not letting it increase their google ranks.
If that has happened and google is better for it, is it not an improvement?
I don’t see the problem with it. It might be a bandaid, but if it prevents comment spammers google placement from increasing, it’s still doing us some good.
And if it actually works that way, maybe comment spam will eventually be less interesting anyway (for a change like that I think it’s much, much to early to tell).
Thinking of it, I can’t think why I bunch of wordpress loving people like yourselves can’t get behind it. One of Wordpress’ core tenets is about expressing data semantically correct. And that’s what nofollow is for.
It’s actually about expressing intention. You can express the difference between an auto-made link, like on comments and such, and one that you link to because you put your own opinions behind it.
It makes sense to me that there is a semantic notation on links in comments that says “this isn’t something I put here myself”, so neighbourhood-based algorithms and any other kind of robot can see the difference.
It may not fix the spamming problem (never thought that was the idea, but I see how it might in the long run), but it’s still a good idea.
Its an artificial constraint. If someone posts a comment on my site, Im happy to reciprocate with a pagerank or 2. If the comment is spam itll get deleted so the link is irrelevant anyway.
Brian —
Not sure I understand you on semantically correct. If a blog owner approves the comment, on some level thats a vote that the person engaged in the discussion and added value to the blog. If your only intention is to “hoard pagerank”, why bother having comments at all?
It clearly does not stop comment spam and in many ways it can depress the blogosphere because active bloggers who participate on many other people’s blogs are now not receiving any sort of pagerank juice for themselves. This can encourage people to just always blog at their own blog rather then reaching out and contributing on other blogs.
For me, if someone contributes to the discussion, they should receive a little bit of link love. Wordpress, unfortunately, does not make it easy to allow links again and I’ll have to look into the plugins to change the default options.
Michael @ SEOG