You might have experienced the job of spammers, commenting with links to their sites if you have a blog or any user interactive website. Google spider (GoogleBot) crawls from one link to other. Suppose you do a post and have users commenting to your post, you will find that you get lots of comments which are really not relevant, but just to create links to some spam websites. Google gives some credit to such links and improves the position in search result ranking. This really spoils Google’s Search results with spammy sites. To avoid this Google introduces this tag rel=nofollow in Jan-2005.
MattCutts announced this at the Google blog and clearly explains that the Google bot will not follow such links and will got be giving any credits for those links. He clearly explains that there is no negative marking for this. This avoids the confusion for genuine commenter. After this announcement, most of the CMS has now plugins which does this work for the web masters and the spammers are disappointed. Most of the CMS like Mediawiki, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Moveable Type has provision to use this feature and its used by most of the webmasters / bloggers. But there are many websites which do not use this and spammers are still playing on this. The interesting part of this tag is that all the Major Search Engines decided to accept this tag which includes MSN and Yahoo apart from Google. So to be clear, What does rel=nofollow means?
- Do not follow that link
- Do not count that link when calculation the pagerank (Effects the number of outgoing links)
- Do not validate the anchor text
So has this feature stopped the spammers? Not, Very clear, still there are spammers as far as web masters are concerned, but Google should have got the benefit. Spammers still try to do posts which are readable to humans and they may follow the link even though GoogleBot stops there. So the pains taken by web masters are not for their own benefit, but to improve the search results of Google, am I right? May be this can help in reducing spam comments, but what about Link trade. When somebody wants to buy a link, the tag is not used. Web masters with high pagerank sell links and earn good bucks and that should be effecting Google Search Results. Recently lots of popular bloggers saw the fall in their pagerank due to this. Google is now asking webmasters to use rel=nofollow for advertizments on their web pages. Many bloggers are really effected with this turn and you should have read lots about this. Matt, the founder of Wordpress says
"In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did these two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it."
Have you heard about rel=dofollow, if this was introduced, it would have been better, web masters could control Googlebot. Will such act make webmasters stop linking to other websites
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