No follow: one year on

Contents:

• Blogs and links
• Blogs knee-capped
• The Blog Evolution
• Blog Spam
• Nofollow - one year on

Blogs and links

Bloggers have traditionally seen themselves as a community experience.

A blogger would comment on a topic, and a string of other bloggers would give it coverage. Great.

An issue developed: the use of trackback and comment links created a massive linking platform.

Blogs could rank very well in search engines, because most big search engines have a part of their ranking alogrithm that sees links to other sites as recommendations.

This gave the blogosphere real commercial potential for the links alone - links which could help commercial sites increase their rankings, and therefore increase their search traffic.

A suitably aggressive business model developed, focused on tapping into this massive interlinking network - blogspam - and much of it automated.

It was a problem for a couple of years, not least because major blog developers, such as Six Apart, made little or no effort to prevent their software being abused in this way.

Then, in January 2005, a major initiative was launched by the combined efforts of the major search engines - the introduction of a new attribute tag for links - nofollow.

Blogs knee-capped

The aim of nofollow was simple - if the blog software developers couldn’t implement anti-spam themselves, search engines would help do it for them.

While many bloggers saw this as a way to stop blog spam, the reality has been very different.

Blog spam still happens - but the linking structure that elevated the prior importance of blogs, was crippled.

This was pretty obvious at the start, but only a few bloggers realised the implications.

Others didn’t care - after all, blogs were intended to be a form of community experience. Many bloggers found concepts such as “PageRank” and “SEO” to be alien. So why care now about what they didn’t understand?

What they didn’t understand was the loss of audience.

With the crippling of the blogosphere as a linking medium, came the knee-capping of blogs as a publishing medium.

The Blog Evolution

The nofollow tag has served as an evolutionary pressure on the blogosphere - it has culled the weak, and focused the blogosphere onto key personalities.

Now being a blogger is no longer enough - to develop an audience for a blog you must now work much harder to be noticed. Having something to actually say is now a primary requisite, not secondary.

The evolution of the blogosphere continues, as only the more serious personal publishing platforms center themselves as places worthy of attention - not from trackbacks or comments, but from their readership commenting directly from their own sites,.

And spam continues regardless.

Blog Spam

Set up a MovableType, trackback a few places, then watch the spambots come in an ping your MT files, filling up your logs with links to porn, casino, and viagra sites.

Nofollow hasn’t stopped blogspam - spambots are cheap enough to make it worth trying, and while the search engines may say nofollow links are of little value, it doesn’t stop many trying anyway.

Has nofollow itself reduced spam?

Most probably - but it hasn’t stopped them trying to find ways to overcome nofollow.

Possibly worse for webmasters, is that while anti-spam measures such as nofollow have been applied, opportunists have continued to seek low-hanging fruit - there has been more aggressive activity with referrer spamming.

Spam issues haven’t gone away - they have diversified.

Nofollow - one year on

So, one year on, what has the nofollow attribute achieved?

The bottom line is that despite the original claim that nofollow will prevent comment spam, it has clearly failed in this area.

What it has provided is a way for search engines to clean up their index of the undue influence of blogs, and especially blogspam, in trackbacks and comments.

In the meantime, the links that previously made the blogosphere so strong have been irrevocably severed, leaving the blogosphere to grow up and mature as a publishing platform.

Conversely, it has become a new tool for abuse, with many webmasters thinking that use of the nofollow link condom is a good way to preserve their own “Google Juice”. Linking is now more widely realised to be a commodity, and less generously shared.

Of course, even after one year, it’s early days yet - education about nofollow and its application hasn’t reached everyone. Ironically enough, even some companies that specialise in blogspamming don’t realise what it’s for. As Jim Boykin reports:

At the last SES conference I ran into a guy who was telling me about having his link team work on 90% blog posts for the purposes of “link building”. I asked him if he checked for the “nofollow” and he said “what’s that?”

In two weeks time it will be the official first birthday of the application of the nofollow attribute.

Ultimately, whether you agree that nofollow has been a good thing or not, it has served to be not simply an evolutionary pressure on the blogsophere, but also the wider internet itself.