Using NoFollow Attribute

The NoFollow attribute came into existence to prevent spammers from gaining undue advantage by posting backlinks in discussion forums and blogs etc. In other words, a nofollow attribute is a necessity to overcome the problem of comment-spamming.

Prominence and usability of websites depends on incoming links to a large extent. Google is known to stress on incoming links as an important parameter which means that both quantity and quality of incoming links play crucial roles in Google’s algorithm.

Since high quality backlinks are difficult to come by - especially for a new website, webmasters look for ways to overcome this difficulty, often at a disadvantage to others.

Public forums became the first victim of link spamming. While discussion forums have their own way to deal with the problem, blogs lack that since most of them are mainly handled and managed by the efforts of one person, which is understandable because blogs are mostly referred to as personal online diaries.

Spamming with unwarranted comments by spammers whose sole purpose is to seek high search rankings by building backlinks to their sites became a big problem. Bloggers had to face the brunt of this onslaught. Often, indiscriminate spamming deters those who are willing to offer genuine comments.

The Solution

The solution has to originate in the site, that is the place where the link exists. So the NoFollow attribute also known as NoFollow Tag came into existence out of this necessity.

Apart from the nofollow attribute, there are other attributes, like for example, inserting rel=’vote-against’ within < a > tag, while others take alternate steps, such as creating captchas, requiring comment makers to register, pre-moderation of comments and so on.

NoFollow Attribute

The NoFollow attribute is one that has to be placed within an anchor tag, for example : < a xhref="anypage.htm" mce_href="anypage.htm" rel="nofollow" >click here< /a >. When the NoFollow attribute is inserted, it signals search engines to the effect that the outgoing link does not have approval for having appeared in the webpage. The NoFollow attribute is an indicator of undesirability of a hyperlink in the webpage in which it appears.

When Google sees the nofollow attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links don’t get any credit when Google ranks websites in their search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted, it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

In other words, Google proposes to deny any benefit accumulating from a hyperlink that contains the nofollow attribute.

Increasingly it is felt that simply including the nofollow attribute will not be able to stop content-spamming. In fact, many blog programs automatically include the nofollow attribute in comment backlinks. But still spams are rampant.

One reason could be that content spammers make use of automated programs that allocate thousands of comments at the click of mouse targeted at vast multitude of blogs.

The second reason may be that spammers feel some links might just be clicked on and converted into sales. For them it is worth taking the chance. Also, who knows some blogs may still be unaware of the nofollow attribute.

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