Nofollow
to Limit Blog and Comment Spam
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc., January 20, 2005
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Over the past year, Blogs have been used to manipulate search engine
rankings in a very big way. Couple the immense power of link-distribution
inherent in the Blogosphere with Google's way of ranking websites based
on the number and relevancy of incoming links and add a number of SEOs
with overactive imaginations - the result is a spamming machine of mythic
proportions.
Remember the SEO competitions of last year with the nonsense phrase: "Nigritude
Ultramarine"? Well, if you don't, suffice it to say it was a contest
to see who could get and keep #1 placement under a phrase that was at the
time, totally fresh as it wasn't a real phrase to begin with. The results
proved the power of Blogs and link-densities. Now Google, Yahoo, MSN and
others have joined together to support a new link-attribute that stops spiders
from following specified links.
The new attribute is called "nofollow" and is designed to be
placed within an anchor tag.
For instance, the link: [a href=”http://www.stepforth.com/”]Search
Engine Placement[/a] will allow a spider to follow the link to the StepForth
homepage.
A similar link, [a href="http://www.stepforth.com/" rel="nofollow"]Search
Engine Placement[/a] will NOT allow the spider to follow. The attribute
can also be placed in front of the URL in the href string.
Google says it will not count links with the nofollow attribute in PageRank
scores and will not count the anchor text in terms of relevancy to the page
linked to. This should effectively remove the benefits of link-spamming
in forums and blogs. Even so, the overactive imaginations found under dark-hats
in the sector are already working on work-arounds. It will be interesting
to see how this new tag works out.
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