24th July 2007

Nofollow spam

posted in Webmastering |

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Stop NofollowI’m in the midst of a complete review of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines which got me thinking about something. Most search engine spamming techniques start out as useful methods of building a site, but when overused go past some invisible threshold into the domain of spamming.

Meta Keywords used to be a way to indicate what the site was about, now it’s pretty much dismissed. Over use of keywords in your content is now keyword stuffing. We’re encouraged to get sites to link to ours but don’t pay or exchange for those links. Clearly any method that is used as an indicator of quality will be abused and eventually fall into the spam category.

This leads me to wonder when the over-use or misuse of nofollow will be seen as a signal of spam. Nofollow wasn’t developed as a tool to help a site rank or even as an indicator of quality, but rather as a help to search engines that couldn’t figure out what was garbage links in blog comments, unattended forums, or guestbooks. With the proliferation of the supplemental results being based solely on PageRank flow through a site, the use of nofollow has increased for internal link management. The original PageRank idea was based on the fact that academic papers on certain subjects that have the most references to them about said subject tend to be authorities. So let’s say you have an established site that claims to be an authority on just about every noun in the English language and they can’t control it’s content any more than they can control their links so they nofollow all of them, the site will soon become the automatic authority on all subjects.  The millions of sites that the wiki uses as it’s sources are now not seen as a source, but rather it itself is seen as the authority.

I haven’t tested it myself, but you know I will.  Is there a bump available for a site to all of a sudden disavow itself from all it’s external links?  Doing so would turn naturally occurring reciprocal links into one-way links to the nofollow abuser?

The nofollow was introduced so that search engines were not being influenced by the works of disingenuous spammers.  But is not the nofollowing of millions, perhaps billions, or otherwise genuine links also influencing the search results in a negative way?   A site like wikipedia with it’s  3.2 million pages in Google’s index definitely has affected the search results, in a negative way.  Perhaps the use of nofollow on such a site has helped curb the attacks by spammers on the wiki, but thats not Google’s problem, and it shouldn’t be mine either.

Sites that artificially link out with all nofollowed links, should be seen for what they are. Spam.  Amazingly some sites that don’t have any external links still rank in Google.  Odd from a company that built its fortune on the concept of linking.

So come on Google when will nofollow abuse be added to the guidelines? Better yet, when will the abusers be punished?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 3:31 am and is filed under Webmastering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. All comments are subject to my NoFollow policy. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 6 responses to “Nofollow spam”

Why not let me know what you think by adding your own comment! All the cool kids are doing it.

  1. 1 MyAvatars 0.2 On July 24th, 2007, dockarl said:

    That’s a thought provoking post John - two thumbs up, sphunn :-)

  2. 2 MyAvatars 0.2 On July 24th, 2007, JohnMu said:

    It’s not so much nofollow abuse, it’s more just a laziness on the part of the webmaster. Just because there are some spam links doesn’t mean that they all are. Imagine you go on a trip and the security guards treat everyone like terrorists. Oh wait… :-).

    One of my gripes about the nofollow is that it is effectively a form of cloaking: telling the search engines that a link is irrelevant while at the same time making it look like a normal link to the users. Imagine if all the links in the Wikipedia were highlighted as being “potentially untrustable” — would anyone view the Wikipedia as being trustable?

  3. 3 MyAvatars 0.2 On July 24th, 2007, dockarl said:

    To me the whole nofollow thing just looks like a stop-gap measure - like Google saying, “ok, our weapon of choice (PR) is out of the bag and losing relevance because people are abusing it - so lets throw the cat amongst the pigeons and give it a shake up”.

    Short to mid term, it’s going to cause alot of flux in the index as it comes back to equilibrium, which may look good from the internal models at Google - but medium term, it’s not going to achieve very much at all - it’ll be the same old same old.

    But nothing says that Google has to always listen to nofollow - so maybe their idea is to stop obeying it once people learn that comment spam isn’t worth the effort. I think if that ever happened you’d find it would coincide with an announcement that the little green bar was to be deprecated.

    Basically in the interim, as you pointed out JLH, if you’re not using nofollow you’re at a disadvantage.

    Nofollow always looked like a ‘patch’ rather than a evolutionary step to me, and I think it’s a strategy built on sand.

    M

  4. 4 MyAvatars 0.2 On July 24th, 2007, Chris Kata said:

    I agree with all of the comments. It’s just a matter of time before this gets abused!

  5. 5 MyAvatars 0.2 On July 25th, 2007, Andy Beard said:

    I am pretty sure Matt Cutts has suggested a number of times to use Nofollow as a tool to block certain pages.

    Whilst Google are known to twist the spin periodically, I can’t remember any total “about face” movements

  6. 6 MyAvatars 0.2 On July 26th, 2007, John Honeck "JLH" said:

    Thanks for the comments everyone, in no particular order here’s my thoughts.

    - Sphinn, it didn’t make it to the home page so I don’t have a feel for the traffic yet.

    - Lazy webmaster is a good point. I also personally feel its a matter of responsibility. If you are going to put forth the effort to maintain a site, part of that is being responsible for its content. If the site outgrows your ability to maintain it, then its either time to sell, grow, shut it down. Nofollowing everything is a cop-out, taking the easy way out. That goes for blogs that nofollow all comments as well.

    - Flux is kind of what I was getting at as well, by “not influencing” search engines nofollow is in fact influencing them. It’s the missing cause that changes history. What if Einsteins mother would have fallen off a horse and died before he was born? The world would never have known what it is missing. With Nofollow the web is one thing, without its another, to say that it doesn’t influence search engines is wrong. The fact that a popular site like wiki isn’t voting for any other sites on the web is a disservice for all of google’s searchers as the sources for most of their pages don’t get the credit they deserve.

    - Using nofollow as a tool is good of course. I nofollow my feeds as well as block them by robots.txt. I look at it like a redirection. If I redirect an old page to a new one, I change my links to the old page to the new one. I don’t want to send the crawlers on a hunt around the site. Well, if I am going to block a page by robots.txt I don’t want to also tell them to crawl it with a link to it.

    - I am just wonder if in the future that the over-use of nofollow will be used as a signal of an overly-optimized site. I use it as a signal of quality, just like a site with no external links is a dead end, so should a site with nofollowed all external links be considered a dead end. It’s contrary to the nature of Google’s ranking algo.

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