Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Nofollow to Check Link Spam

Google Introduced 'Nofollow', a special tag system.
Due to the burst of blogs and eMarketers, comments span,link spam has been increasing.People leave comments and their links as comments or somehow manage to add their site link at other sites.This has created a nuisance in the blogosphere.

This is what Google says : If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our 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

Msn search and Yahoo have given their support to Google in this regard.Many sofware companies have already come up and engaged themselves with Google in building the nofollow software.Once the software is uploaded,all the links in the comments (links which appear after 'posted by') will include the 'nofollow' tag,that means all those links would be useless ( to the author and to the commenters).

Wikipedia is going to be affected a lot by this 'Nofollow' tag.Because Wikepedia is built by innumerable people whose took lot of pain to nourish it all these days.Now their links would be left out,their links would only have an importance of a 'wikipedia' inbound link,losing their individuality.It may lose its reputation and the number of interested authors at wikipedia would dramatically fall down.
Nofollow also has some good news for wikepedia.Wikipedia is the largest target of Link spam.Though it disagreed to 'nofollow' in the beginning,now it has accepted to adopt nofollow.But most of the SEO gurus are optimistic that wikipedia would develop another software for itself in near future in order to save its authors.

While thats the case with Wikipedia,even bloggers have their own share of bad news.Nofollow would not only check comment spam but also legitimate links which are supposed to improve their page rank.It is being considered as a double endged knife by SEO experts.For Bloggers, only a few bloggers are going to get benefited from this 'nofollow' because those who get comment and link spams must be daily users of the internet and the only reason why they keep the comments in their page is to increase their page rank.Removing a few comments a day wont be a big problem for daily users.

On the whole, there is going to be a dramtic and sudden change in SEO because of 'nofollow'

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

aloha! :) found u

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