City Social Marketing on Nofollow, Google and Spam… Oh My!

I’ve seen the comment made of “Simply put, don’t follow this link out of my blog, and don’t have my blog cast a vote for the page that the link links to.” This seemed as a wrong, or misleading, explanation of what the attribute of Nofollow does, so I checked it out. I began with a site called The Official Google Blog and on that site I found an article entitled Preventing Comment Spam (dated: 1/18/2005 04:28:00 PM), it stated:
“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.”

Strictly based upon what the exact words of the article state, I saw where this statement tells us that the Nofollow attribute is telling the Google search engine to “Not use these links in your ranking of my blog“, whether the Nofollow tells Google to not actually follow the links was not said. I wanted more information on this thought, so I searched Google and found a blog called Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO. This blog stated:

“The rel=”nofollow” attribute is an easy way for a website to tell search engines that the website can’t or doesn’t want to vouch for a link. The best-known use for nofollow is blog comment spam, but the mechanism is completely general. Nofollow is recommended anywhere that links can’t be vouched for. If your logs analysis program shows referrers as hyperlinks, I’d recommend using nofollow on those links. If you have a wiki that anyone on the web can edit, I’d recommend nofollow on those links until you can find a way to trust those links. In general, if you have an application that allows others to add links, web spammers will eventually find your pages and start annoying you.”

Now I had no idea who Matt Cutts is, except for being a blogger,, so I went to the Google search engine and found a link to Wikipedia about him. It said in an article called Matt Cutts:

Matt Cutts works for the quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam.

So Matt works for Google, how interesting. Matt also said that the Nofollow attribute is “an easy way for a website to tell search engines that the website can’t or doesn’t want to vouch for a link“. No offense to Matt, but I want more confirmation before I believe that Google still will follow links with the Nofollow attribute.

It was back to Wikipedia for a search on Nofollow. I found the following comments: :

How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.”

This seems to be saying what the Google blog indicated and Matt Cutts said. So I read the article further and read the following:

While all engines that support the attribute exclude links that use the attribute from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary from search engine to search engine.

Google takes “nofollow” literally and does not “follow” the link at all. That is supposedly their official statement, but experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. They show instead that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google’s index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page). Links with “nofollow” are included in the backlinks reporting data at Google’s Webmaster Central.

Yahoo! “follows it”, but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
MSN Search respects “nofollow” as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not MSN follows the link.
Ask.com does not use the attribute for anything.”

Main Source:

Wikipedia: No follow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow)

Sub-sources:

Loren Baker (April 29, 2007), How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-google-yahoo-askcom-treat-the-no-follow-link-attribute/4801/), Search Engine Journal, retrieved May 29, 2007

Michael Duz (December 2, 2006), rel=”nofollow” Google, Yahoo and MSN (http://www.seo-blog.com/rel-nofollow.php), SEO Blog, retrieved May 29, 2007

Rel Nofollow Test (http://www.bubub.org/rel_nofollow_test.html) from August 2007

This bit of information can be useful, but it seems clear that “Nofollow” doesn’t really mean “Do not follow the links”. At this point I am thinking that Google misnamed the attribute because of the confusion factor. I decided to press on and try some more sources. I decided to hit the blog of a man named Andy Beard, who is well respected in the community, to see what he said. I found an article called Exclusive: Share A Post Beta - Blog Post Syndication, where Andy said:
:
Dave Naylor seems to think it is a good idea to nofollow blog comments.
In many ways he is right:

You get increased automated comment spam
You get increased spam from outsourced commenting
You get increased spam from people using commenting efficiency tools (Comment Kahuna, Comment Hut etc)
You get increased spam from people using dofollow search engines
You get increased spam from people using lists of dofollow blogs
You get Internet Marketing Gurus encouraging their interns to comment on their behalf

It takes additional time to manage comments on your blog even when you set up Spam Karma effectively, but that is something you could outsource to compensate, or have managed by a more junior member of staff.

You also leak a little bit of extra juice, how much depends on your site structure, and how many comments you get. Some people prefer to have huge blogrolls of the people who buy them drinks at seminars.

Now Andy doesn’t actually say “Nofollow doesn’t cause Google, or search engines, to follow links, but he did talk about Nofollow being a good thing because of the spam factor and things he calls “Leaks”

I finally went to see what Chris Lang of Key Web Data had to say. I’ve known Chris to have mentioned Nofollow before and figured he would have something. In an article entitled Google PageRank and Your Google Juice, where he stated:

“Google does follow the link, it just does not give it the weight accorded dofollow links, or just regular links. nofollow from Wikipedia to clear this up.”

So it seems clear that Nofollow is an attribute which has nothing to do with whether Google follows the links or not, it’s for the purpose of telling Google that you are not vouching for the places where the links transport you. That’s fine by me.

Our sites and blogs gain a good reputation, or a bad one, by various means. They are judged on appearance, content, the knowledge we profess, and by the company we keep. One way to judge the company we keep is through the links on our web pages and blogs. This not only works with people, but since people program the Google bots, then I believe it works there to a degree as well. I don’t want Google, or anyone else, thinking that I vouch for things simply because some one posted link in the comments on my Blog. If I want to vouch for something, or someone, then I will do it myself… thank you very much.