Two years ago today, we released WordPress version 1.5. This was a pretty major release that introduced several new features that are still major staples of the current 2.1 branch: the Dashboard, Themes, and Pages. It also added a minor new change which was mildly controversial to some: comments were automatically flagged with the ‘nofollow’ attribute.
The rel="nofollow" idea had good intentions: to give content producers a way to link to another site without implying that they approve of it. The way it works is that if Google, or Yahoo!, or any other service that uses this standard sees a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link, they will ignore it. They don’t follow the link, and they don’t count the link in the destination site’s ranking calculations. One of the main use cases (as in WordPress’ case), was to reduce the effectiveness of comment spam, because the spammers would not get any “Google Juice” out of the links. Hurray for our side! We just stuck our finger in the spammer’s eye!
Unfortunately, we also tweaked the eyes of our regular readers, most of whom could probably use a little of that Juice. “Oh well,” we said. “That’s just the price we have to pay for a little peace of mind.” Well, most of us said that. Some were adamantly opposed to the nofollow idea. Many of us knew that it was just a bandaid, and that it wouldn’t really deter spammers from trying, it would just reduce their ability to get high rankings in search engines.
At the time, comment spam was a pretty major problem on many blogs, and there weren’t many effective remedies. It seemed like all of us spent the beginning of each day going through our comment queue, manually deleting the garbage that made it through the gauntlet of whatever defenses we did have in place. So, nofollow was the last-ditch attempt to deny satisfaction to the spammers when our other measures failed. But it did not discriminate. It had no way to know whether it was de-juicing a good guy or a bad guy. (Eric Meyer had some good thoughts on this subject, BTW.)
These days, many sites have better anti-spam measure in place. Akismet has been very effective, and many WordPress users swear by Spam Karma 2. With measures like these in place, hardly any spams ever make it through to be displayed on your blog. And if they do, hopefully you delete them pretty quickly after they appear. So, that’s even better than just telling search engines not to index their links. They can’t index something that they never see in the first place, right?
With that in mind, I’ve installed Kimmo Suominen’s dofollow plugin here, and configured it to remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute from comment links after two days. The two day limitation is to account for the occasional hiccup where spam might make it through over a weekend, and I don’t get to delete it immediately. The important thing is that I’ll be giving back the Juice to the comments that get to stay here. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, and you feel like comment spam is under control on your site, I encourage you to do the same.
43 Comments
Btw, it’s Kimmo Suominen, not Suomenin.
Good point. I somehow saw the nofollow tag helping search engines focus on fewer links than before and thus having less stress [technically], if you can call it that. To the average user and commentor, it was somehow not that beneficial. It was interesting to see Wikipedia adopting the nofollow tag recently, making sure that it takes all the “juice” and doesn’t give much back to the community itself other than the articles themselves. I like my readers, and I want them to get any juice they can because they dedicate time and effort to come and participate on my site.
As for Akismet, it has been effective for me also, eliminating the need for a nofollow tag so far. Very rarely does it get a few false positives, but since one can go through the spam moderation folder before deleting, it is easy to let Akismet know about the mistakes it makes so it can improve.
I am also using a plugin [from 2005] to achieve similar results:
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-15-plugin-strip-nofollow-tag-from-comment-urls/
Thanks for sharing your opinion on this.
Glad to know you’ve joined the list of not using nofollow.
I’ve got Dofollow installed on my main blog.
I like the idea of KimmoSuominen’s plugin of removing after a few days. Is this a permanent remove? Or does it do it on the fly?
That’s my exact set up too… a couple of days seems sufficient to weed out the occasional spam missed by Akismet
I find it interesting that you link to Wikipedia without any “nofollow noindex” remarks while they themselves mark such links as such.
Link. Scobleizer talked about this as well recently but I can’t find it right off.
drmike, you bring up an excellent point. That is why many people are stumped. People are willing to link to Wikipedia and make them popular through such links [like the one Dougal posted above], and the Wikipedia staff does get paid through such popularity [donations mainly because of being so popular], yet Wikipedia has decided to classify all external links as something that major search engines should not pay any attention to.
Nicd: Oops, so right. Corrected. (Dang, I just knew I was going to typo his name)
Ajay: I think the answer to your question is “yes”. Or actually, “it depends”. If you don’t use the timeout feature, the plugin will filter out the rel=”nofollow” on comment links before they go into the database. But in any case, it will strip them out at display time on a comment-by-comment basis.
drmike: I’m not saying that nobody should use nofollow. I’m saying that in my case, I have confidence in my ability to block spam links by other means, so that nofollow isn’t necessary. Wikipedia is a completely different animal from a personal blog, and has a whole different set of considerations. While the lack of “juice” to legitimate links is disappointing, I understand why they feel the need to use nofollow. Perhaps in the future, they could “re-follow” links from pages that haven’t been edited in more than a week, or somesuch measure like that.
Bes Z: As I stated above, I don’t hold anything against Wikipedia for using nofollow. That’s their decision to make based on their circumstances.
Another person to see the light.
I’ve never considered rel=nofollow anything more than Google’s answer to a fundamental flaw in pagerank, I said as much at the time too (anyone who assumes Google did it for “the love” of the blogging community has a screw loose).
To be honest - with the advent of Akismet and a number of good anti-spam technologies, I have no clue why rel=nofollow remains in the wordpress core, given it does exactly 0 to help and simply denies every valid commenter link juice.
Nice to see you join the ever growing number of people who have ignored Google’s idea of a good time.
Has it been two years already? Seems like just yesterday when combating spam was a daily exercise in patience
I sure do wish we could dump nofollow from the core. Frankly, I’m far more inclined to comment and participate on sites and forums without nofollow. If I see a nofollow tag, I question if I really want to contribute.
The only reasonable rationale for nofollow I’ve ever heard is explained as “This means the site owner did not link to the site in question, but rather a user did, and thus the site owner does not want to be responsible for the content.”
That’s great in theory… but if whatever your comments or users are linking to is bad enough you don’t want Google to count it against you, you ought to be filtering it out anyway.
Bravo. I’ve now installed this on my blog. I’m very happy to see a push to remove nofollows. They weren’t a great solution when they began and we’ve got better tools now so let’s abolish them. I really appreciate the discussion on this topic Dougal.
I have been using a dofollow plugin on my blog for quite a while, but it wasn’r until after I had tried several comment spam plugins that I was brave enough to do it.
With the effectiveness of akismet and spam karma, it might be time for WP to consider taking out the nofollow altogther, eh?
Wow, I didn’t expect this to get as much as attention as it has.
For those of you who suggest removing nofollow as a default option in core, I’m pretty sure that it will stay in for the foreseeable future. Why? Because one of the things it guards against is orphaned blogs.
Blogs that are set up and then forgotten by their owners are a favorite target for spammers. These sites will collect spam comments for months, or years, with nobody around to “tend the garden”. While an individual orphaned site is unlikely to lend much juice to the spammed links, the collective weight of the multitude of long-tail orphans will add up without nofollow in place.
Sure, you and I are vigilant about weeding our comments, but there are more sites out there than we can imagine that are just crawling with unmoderated spams.
Dougal
There are other ways to handle orphaned blogs
1. If comments haven’t been moderated for x weeks, enforce moderation on all comments
2. If comments haven’t been moderated for x months, switch off the comment form
Implementing something like this would then allow Wordpress.com to maybe think about optionally allowing some kind of dofollow
I’am very surprised about such things as nofollow, mail providers ban and other anti spam tricks, which realy harm users more than spammers. I have an article on a several tricks on how to protect from spam. Quite easy and effective.
I too will remove it, I’m glad to see people taking this stance. With other more effective means of spam prevention the nofollow doesn’t make sense.
I’ve thought about this for quite a while, and heard both sides of the debate. I’ve decided you’re right. We bloggers need to band together to make us an even bigger force in the search engines…
Yay for DoFollow!
- Art Kauffman
Glad to hear that you’re using DoFollow, especially since you have influence over the design of WordPress.
Personally, after reading Andy Beard’s Ultimate List of DoFollow Plugins, I’ve decided to reward commenters with at least 3 comments and not just anyone. So, I’ve switched to LinkLove. I hope this won’t be perceived as calculating. I merely think that a dialog on a post surely isn’t made up of just one comment.
This is a great addition. I agree that the no follow process is rather pointless because comments are so vital to what makes a blog a blog. It is interaction, evaluation, contribution, and serving a common good. I think it is a great tool.
Very good stuff guys. Has anyone else noticed that Yahoo seems to be counting links that have ‘no follow’s on them? I was looking through some of my links in the yahoo engine and noticed that some of them had no follows on them. I think they count them! It would be somewhat of a victory if they discarded the Google invented command.
As a reletively new webmaster I was not aware of the differance in follow or no follow, Does it affect my linkbacks, traffic or pagerank at google. I own a few web directories and just turned the no-follow attribute off because all the honest directory postings were not getting their just reward. And I also reallise the wast of all those good posts and info that should get indexed.
Dan Bradstreet
For the most part, I agree with you. However, comment spam is fast evolving. Many are now using Markov Chain-based systems that use proxy farms. Not only does the text and link change, the IPs change with it. Also, I noticed a few were doing logic linking to get around bans.
Yup, as a matter of fact, I got hit by one of those spammers today. They pingbacked a recent post, and the originating site had used Markov chaining to create content that almost-but-not-quite made sense. It combined a couple of sentences from my post with text from other content.
After digging around on the domain (there appeared to be several sub-blogs running under the main domain), I found the whole site was like that. Ever post was full of semi-random algorithmically mashed-up text based on a common theme, and of course, the site was covered in Adsense.
I reported the sites to Google, and to the web hosting company.
What you are missing is that people will post “related” comments just to get links. I don’t know if its worth it.
I’ve been using DoFollow for sometime now and participated in all of the hype surrounding it by leaving comments on posts like this. I think it does build more of a community as encourages comments which is what we all like to see right?
i’ve been using the semiologic’s dofollow plugin, and its working great, i also have the math plugin to prevent comment spam (although this is not 100% foolproof)
Yeah us too - good bye nofollow. After researching the NoFollow tag I’m surprised it was introduced at all at any time. Who was it supposed to deter? Spammers don’t care if it is a human or spider that clicks on a link, so they will always keep trying to spam blogs - it costs them nothing to do it - they’re not exactly going to put in measures to avoid “nofollow blogs if their spam bot detects it are they?
“With that in mind, I’ve installed Kimmo Suominen’s dofollow plugin here, and configured it to remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute from comment links after two days”
On my mind this is very great idea! It need to make a some “pressure” on Blogs nd GuestBook software’s manufacturers to implement this future as default setting.
May be more better to leave rel=”nofollow” in all posts, while they “not approved” by site owner or administrator via AdminPanel.
Thus, all nonmoderated blogs nd guestbooks cannot influence the SEPR!
I used similar idea at my russian forum, but the above idea is more flexible nd usefull.
If you do not object, I shall use it in my further projects.
There is also a little community that sounds like “U comment - I follow”, anyway I agree with you, I have recently installed it on my blog.
I have implemented this do follow in my blog and I think it is worthit since the comments on my blogs increases
google has even gone so far as to say recently that all advertising links should include the use of the nofollow attribute in their attempt to regular the sale of links for PR purposes. Matt Cutt’s blog talks about this in great depth.
Is this plugin specific to Wordpress?
Hi Doug,
I finally removed nofollow today. Nofollow is irrelevant with comment spams. I let Askimet and Spam Karma to catch them
Maybe the next version of Wordpress could be DoFollow by default. Then let’s see how many versions of NoFollow plugins are developed.
Or better yet, more likely that one could develop a plugin that tweaks DoFollow under certain conditions, such as during moderation. The blog author could leave the link but apply NoFollow, maybe?
The 2 day limitation is absolutely brilliant - plenty of time to catch the spammers who are the only reason to not pass along the juice. Unfortunately, many people are laboring under the incorrect assumption that a link from them somehow detracts from their own PR, and this is a reason many folks use “nofollow”. I have even seen it on a links page where they traded with others! I have to assume it isn’t completely malicious, but sheer ignorance.
As a new webmaster I was not aware of the difference in follow or nofollow, Does no follow mean a higher page rank because of less pagerank leakage? How would nofollow affect my incomming links, Do webmasters check for no-follow in the source code before linking. And even if they did how would it affect my site. Would I receive less targeted web traffic.
Good read, I actually just added dofollow because of it. Thanks
I just realized that so many blogs around use the nofollow practice… it’s not-so-good.
I read it and I think you are right. You should write more about it.
I’ll remove nofollow and let Akismet handle the spammers in my site.
Nice Information for Nofollow.. thanks
Every single link on the page is “nofollow” because of the meta robots tag:
Even if the links don’t have the nofollow attribute individually, the robots meta tag cuts any hope of passing link juice from this page.
I think nofollow was a good idea as a basic antidote to spam marketing, but things have moved on since then and there are more sophisticated methods around now. Also, it should be in the hands of the individual blogger how comments are handled.
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