Anti-Nofollow FUD

Anil,

Glad you don't think all those of us who have misgivings about rel="nofollow" are link spammers …

Forgive me if I've not cottoned on to something here, but in your bullet points you say 'having options is good'. Couldn't agree more. But there isn't any option for TypePad users, is there? As far as I know, "nofollow" is just on — automatically. I absolutely, definitely want to be able to safelist commenters and TrackBack-ers I like, know or trust.

I'd be delighted if I'm wrong and do have an option I can exercise. Can you clear this up for me and other TypePad users? Thanks.

David

Anil, the site's a light-hearted joke. Believe me, Todd Friesen who threw the site up isn't trying to spread FUD about nofollow through that site. It's more an inside things for those who know search engines and are talking about the issues of nofollow OUTSIDE blogging. Want a taste of that? Then check out this thread at our forums that goes into the non-blogging issues more.

No time for that? Then let's go back and look at the main points highlighted on that page about "uses" of nofollow:

• Hoard your PageRank
• Hide your outgoing links
• Screw your reciprocal link partners
• Add code bloat to your page
• Find out today if people are buying links for the right reasons
• Yet more to obsess about
• Freely link to bad neighbourhoods
• Far easier to use than JavaScript, perl, php, robots.txt etc

Where's the mention of comment spam in those? The word "blog" isn't on the page once and "comment spam" is down in small text as a joking aside. If this were a rant against nofollow being useless at combating comment spam, why bury it like that?

Answer? Because it's not a rant on nofollow as it relates to blogs. It's a joke having fun at the issues of nofollow that those OUTSIDE of blogging are contemplating in the wake of the tag. I'll take up some of the bigger points and explain them:

Hoarding: Some people want to get tricky and not let anything outside their own web site get link credit. It's not a blog thing -- it's a link thing. Personally, I think it's a waste of time. But for those who do worry about it, nofollow gives them a nice, new approved tool to hoard link credit.

Hiding: Some people want to link out so search engines feel they have a "natural" site but don't really want to show those links. Nofollow may -- or may not -- allow that. It's a new thing they'll try.

Screwing: Well, some people swap links for reasons good and bad, and for reasons before we had blogs and even before the search engines did much with links. And that link swapping -- again, completely outside of blogs in many cases, may now be impacted. Because if someone links to you, they might not really link in a way that gives you search credit. If that's what you wanted, you'd better know they've put a "condom" in the form of nofollow around that link.

Buying Links: People buy and sell links outside of blogs, often times for reasons of getting better rankings in search engines. Nofollow means that you can now sell links but say to the world, "Hey, I'm not doing this to mess with search rankings." That's nice if you're a big site that might want ensure you aren't going to be tainted as some type of search evil-doer. Then again, if you are someone buying links and doing it for just search reasons, you'd better make sure you don't buy them with nofollow on.

Bad Neighborhoods: Google and gang will tell you not to link to bad neighborhoods. Do you know what those are? I don't -- they didn't publish a list along with that advice. Maybe it's a porn site. Maybe it's a link farm. Maybe a porn site like Playboy is OK though. And maybe you are some newbie web author freaked out that anything you link to might get you into trouble.

I know those people because I have to deal with their questions and worries after the search engines have unleashed the fear factor. So the point is -- are you freaked out? Hey, use this new link condom and you can link safely. And by the way, it's another non-blog specific issue. It has an impact on all web authors. It's actually a great tool for anyone to use.

Easier to use: Yeah, it is easier to use. You and Todd seem to agree on this. Having easy options is good.

Now, I know you've got generally a bad view SEO, that it seems populated with scumbags like the supposed scumbag behind this site -- and being on the sharp end of blog spam, its understandable. But let's get personal a moment about the scumbag in question for this site.

Who published it? Someone who definitely does black hat SEO, yep. Someone who does white hat SEO, as well. And someone who knows a heck of a lot more about how search engines work -- and how this tag will and will not have an impact -- than the vast majority of people out there.

Scumbag? Then Yahoo -- who joined you and the other major search engines  on nofollow -- is hanging out with scumbags, because Todd and I and several others all had a nice dinner recently with key people from Yahoo's search team last month.

Oh, and Todd's good friend Greg? One of MSN's search champs that got invited up with a few months ago along with key bloggers that MSN itself talked about in its post on adding nofollow. Why invited? Because despite being black hat at times, he also knows search intimately.

Let's not leave out Google. Todd and Greg have better contacts with Google's search engineering teams than the vast majority of people. Why? Because those scumbags know search so well they're respected for it. That's why I myself have them talk on search issues. There's a lot to learn from them regardless of what hat you wear.

Now for some of your points:

Nofollow Gives Choices: Yep!. I love it for that. Bring on more choice with what search engines do and don't index, so people like Brad Choate don't have to cloak and violate search engine guidelines. Brad, cloaking. Yeah, my How About An Indexing Summit! explains why he ended up doing this without realizing it. And by the way, that also puts Brad on the same exact page as people like Greg and Todd, who feel like they should be able to control their content as fed to search engines as much as Brad wants to.

Rankings From Blog Posts Won't Be Impacted: Oh yes they will. Hey, Jeremy says he's just put nofollow on the link to Todd's site in his post about it. Hey, that's a ranking impact. If someone links to you (on a blog, in blog comments, in a blog post, on your personal home page whatever) and now uses nofollow, you aren't getting the credit for that link. That's their choice, and I'm glad they have it. And they've had it before, but not as easily as nofollow makes it now. But you'd better believe it will have an impact. Whether it's good, bad or very little remains to be seen. For most people with quality content, probably very little.

PageRank Is Not A Contest: Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Geez, I beg and plead for you, someone with such high standing in the blogging community, to stop making such bad mistakes and spreading misinformation about search. Perhaps you should be forgiven, given that the PR-meisters themselves at Google often make the same mistake. But to clarify:

PageRank is how Google calculates the popularity of a page, based on looking at all the links across the web. But you don't want PageRank alone. Go on, search for "cars." Did you see Amazon come up? No -- because despite having incredibly high PageRank, it's not got anchor text with the word "cars" pointing at it. So PageRank does not equal how Google ranks pages in search results. It is one key component, with the other two being the link text itself and the words on a page itself.

PageRank is also a Google-specific thing. Nofollow has an impact with ALL three major search engines participating, so talking about PageRank just reinforces the notion that it's all-Google or nothing world, when it is not. In fact, Ask Jeeves is specifically not supporting nofollow at the moment because they use a radically different ranking system that they feel might not be impacted by blog spam, link spam, link bombing and so on.

What you're really saying is that search rankings are not supposed to be a contest but instead be an objective decision of a mix of factors that the search algorithm uses to determine what's relevant. And it's a nice goal, but it's not true.

Even if we had no blogs -- no SEO -- no spammers, search algorithms wouldn't get it perfectly right. That's because people still make unintentional mistakes, create non-search engine friendly sites, rely on graphics rather than text, Flash rather than text and a host of other issues that ensure there's no such thing as a "level playing field" on the web. That's also, by the way, where plenty of SEO firms that you'd like come into play. They can help clear up many mistakes that the search engines themselves suggest fixing.

As for being a contest, search rankings are indeed one. And PageRank specifically itself is definitely a contest. Remember, when Google talks about counting links as a key component of what it does, it talks about relying on the web's "uniquely democratic nature." Democracy -- that's a popularity contest. In fact, to quote Google:

Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Not a contest? If it's not a contest, then what are all those votes being counted? Maybe nofollow will help ensure that we don't have a lot of chads polluting the election, but then again, maybe not.

What is clear is that nofollow will NOT stop blog comment spam. Not at all. Don't believe it? Then right now, all bloggers can stop making use of blacklists, registration schemes and other tactics used before nofollow emerged. Sit back and see if the spam goes away. It won't. Nofollow is a nice new tool that we can use, one that as I've said many times before is welcomed for giving us choice and more options, but it's not a magic bullet. Well, it's a magic bullet for one thing. It now lets the search engines say to bloggers, we gave you want you wanted, stop blaming us for the problem!

Danny, that's the best post i've seen you make in a long time - nice. We've disagreed a little over this NoFollow nonsense and i still think it's a dreadful idea but we do appear to be getting closer. I'd agree with almost all of that.

When are bloggers going to learn that in order to kill comment spam you are going to have to TALK to the spammers? It's really rather simple: Instead of burying your heads in the sand on issues you clearly have no understanding of, talk to those that do.

You'd be surprised just how willing some of them would be to talk to you.

NoFollow is a joke. It's been given to you buy the search engines To shut you up - why can't you see that?

>Blog Spam Economics
NoFollow will almost certainly make blog spam worse. Seriously. The spammers i've spoken to will just be hitting 2x 3x 10x as many blogs in order to find the millions of blogs that wont be using NoSense - the millions of blogs that wont get updated, the abandoned blogs.

Bandwidth is cheap, it'll just take 2hrs instead of 1 to hit as many blogs - no biggie for hardcore spammers.

We've talked about the best ways bloggers can kill comment spam alot at Threadwatch - you really should take a peek outside of your closed sphere now and again and come to terms with the fact that the world does not revolve around your websites.

As for Linkcondom - im very nearly speechless. How on earth could you miss the point with such seeiming ease? It has parody plastered all over it and as danny said, only mentins spam once...

Come on Anil, im sure you're not stupid. Just have a look around outside of the blogs for a bit eh?

Good comments Anil,

My main concern with Nofollow is not about how it treats future links in comments but rather past ones.

I want to say up front that I applaud the moves to combat comment spam - but I worry that in doing so we are penalizing legitimate bloggers who have been leaving comments on blogs for years now with pure motivations.

I'll use myself as an example - I do not leave comments on other bloggers sites to boost my page ranking - I do so to interact, to network, to support, to debate and basically because I like to have a say. Of course every time I comment I leave a link - again not to boost my ranking but to continue the conversation.

Ok - so I'm a nice guy doing things the right way. However a result of me being such a nice guy is that over the last two years of blogging I've probably left around 10 comments every day on other bloggers sites. Thats over 7000 links back to my own sites - anyone would admit that that is a nice side benefit of being a nice guy. It was not my intention to build this kind of backlink stock but it happened.

My concern is that this is a common story and that many bloggers who are legitimate commenters are about to see a massive decrease in their backlinks to their sites and in the months ahead will see a corresponding decrease in their rankings in search engines.

I wonder if in endorsing Google's Nofollow tag whether we're actually going to see a lot of blogs disappear from the top of search engine rankings - have we perhaps just done something that will decrease the profile of the blogosphere? Of course I need to remind myself that its all relative - while my site may fall in its backlinks so will many others (including spammers) so maybe things wont change too much...

To be completely honest I'm a little torn here. I'm bracing myself for a bit of a hit as someone who makes his living from blogging - my motivation for arguing this case is partly selfish - I could have to go find a 'real job' again - but I also worry for the blogosphere a little.

- Will there be some benefits from NoFollow? Yep I suspect there will be.
- Will it iradicate comment spam - I doubt it - there must be millions of blogs out there that will not implement NoFollow because they are run by people who won't know how or they are 'dead blogs'.
- Will it hurt bloggers to lose thousands of backlinks? The jury is still out but I suspect if NoFollow is implemented widely it will be.

I guess what I'm trying to weigh up is what are the benefits and what are the costs of NoFollow? I'm happy to see it implemented if the benefits outweigh the costs but most of those I see arguing FOR it don't seem to be acknowledging the downsides (of which there is always some in any step forward).

Anyway - thanks for your post - interested in what you see as being the costs of the system Anil? Obviously you're in favor of it but do you see that there will be any sacrifices that bloggers will have to make to get rid of spam?

First, Danny, thanks for your second excellent comment on my site this week. I should preface everything I'm saying with the fact that I'm speaking to a different audience than you generally are, and that accounts for the core of the distinction between what we're saying. We're both right for our respective audiences, I think.

Also, I think the overwhelming majority of people in the SEO trade do reputable, valuable work.

But. I *also* know that black-hat link spammers recently flooded the site of a person whom I respect who had recently passed away. On the thread where his sister was inviting memorial posts. Maybe black-hats can live with that as part of the cost of the way they do business, but real people with real lives express real emotions in this medium, and I find it as unacceptable as when they (presumably) attend people's funerals and shout advertising messages at the mourners.

I don't doubt that black hats are knowledgeable in their subject areas. Many people become knowledgeable about communities or individuals they want to exploit. Sometimes it's a necessity.

I am keenly aware that PageRank is not the ranking of a site in SERP pages on Google. What might not be clear from the context in which I'm posting (or the community I'm addressing) is that there *is* a big community of PR-obsessed bloggers, who see the green line on their Googlebar as some affirmation of self. They hack MT to publish URLs with hyphens instead of underscores in order to please Googlebot. I think that's silly. And that's whom I was addressing.

Let me make a finer point about whether this solves link spam. Here's an excerpt from the post on our Professional Network when nofollow was announced:

* So, this solves comment spam?

In a word, no. But it makes things a lot better. For both comments and TrackBacks, we believe this removes much of the incentive (in PageRank or relevance ranking) for creating comment spam. But some users might not upgrade or install plugins to enable support, and there will always be some websites that accept user-submitted content without filtering it.

So I'd say, it's as important for the search community to look outside their own and look at bloggers as vice versa. SEOs seem to think bloggers get appeased just because we're loud. It might have more to do with the fact that there's a lot more of us and we're closer to the real target audience for the search companies. It's just good business.

Finally, I've spent a lot of time getting to know a lot more about the SEO community. Some of it's fascinating, some of it's challenging, and some of it's frustrating. Mostly, though, I'm astonished at the lack of accountability that white hats apply to black hats. There's a small number of vocal people trying to defend the industry, but there's an awful lot of apologists for people who are behaving in what is, at the least, an extraordinarily anti-social behavior.

There are people, both in the company I work for and in others in our industry, who spend a lot of time understanding and approaching *all* the members of the SEO community. And I definitely do plan to try to engage that community more fully. But part of the misunderstanding might be that this is my personal site. On my personal site, I can say that I'd love to meet the link spammers responsible for putting rape porn links up on my friends' blogs, but it's not so I can have a pleasant meeting with them.

Anil - let me assure you LinkCondom.com is a parody site. Signing up for a few 'grey' area affiliate programs was just icing on the cake. A decent little controversy mixed up with some conspiracy theory and a boring Thursday afternoon and voila!! LinkCondom is born. No ulterior motive - no shot at bloggers - no shot at the SEs. Just a little fun. Come to SES in NY and we'll have a chuckle over a beer :)

Fair enough, Todd. Thanks for the comment.

((Big Grin))

Looks like it is time to trot out a link to Alaina's post from last May:

http://www.alaina.org/tigerbunny/2004/05/dear_blogospher.html

Personally, I could care less about Page Rank and protecting thereof. But I do care about the fact that I am trying to build a community that is getting lost in trackback and comment spam.

smiles, jen ;o)

Ok, in the 40 minutes since my last comment, I have done some more thinking on comment spam, SEOs, and NoFollow.

I blog to show my community my photography, life, quirky thoughts/links, and writing, as well as interact online with my community. Most of my folks don't comment on my blog, they start conversations with me face to face about things I have brought up on the blog.

The night before last, a guy I know walked up to me at a nightclub and told me that he loved my tree photos from my neighborhood. I offered to walk him around and show him the trees in person. Now this is why I blog. Connections. Conversation. Dialogue. Sharing.

I love trees, people, history/locality, birds, punk rock, computers, making art and reading. I don't like rolexs, consumerism, rape, viagra, pOrn, poker, and spam at all.

As a user of Movable Type and a web designer who has now migrated 1/2 of my clients to MT, I don't want comment or trackback spam. At all. Bye Bye.

Ever since I put my two main blogs on Typekey authentification only, I have been having a terrible time with trackback spam of the worse sort.

As an experiment, I loaded NoFollow and Blacklist on one of the blogs and neither on the other. The protected blog has only Typekey registered commenters and the unprotected one has 25 trackback spams a day. Tonight, I shut off trackbacking on both blogs. This is sad.

I want my community to be free to comment. I want to be free to comment or trackback on other blogs without suspicion of motive, but instead to participate in community and conversation.

To the SEOs, give it up. I realize that your lease on your PEV/porsche needs you to make 6 figures and your competive drive demands that you be first, but create good content and let that speak for itself. Good content rises to the top over time when it is found by the folks who need it. That is the beauty of the internet.

If your competitive drive demands more, then take up crew rowing or masters running or competitive knitting or triatholons. Maybe get a boyfriend and a girlfriend all at once, take viagra and ...

Finally, to quote Madeleine L'Engle:

"I am not a consumer. Fire consumes. Cancer consumes. I am a human being."

smiles, jen ;o)