I have been searching around on the internet, having a look for some evidence to indicate why I should bother maintaining a nofollow structure on any software I write. It was originally a concept by Google, back in the Pagerank beta, to combat the abuse of link-based spam, but many predicted its failure. Has it really done anything? Well the numbers say no.

The first point that I would like to make is that the actual numbers of link spam has increased 100 fold. You can see that by looking at my 200 line moderation queue that seems to build up over night. Many people around the net also find a similar problem, including … (all of which have been nofollow’ed. Yay) on second thoughts, just Google it! There are societies and probably weird cults against such ideas, if you search hard enough. Concernedly I’m not joking. EDIT: Damn you auto-spell-check.

The next is that withdrawing nofollow from WordPress, either with the dofollow plugin, or by manually adjusting the code does not make any difference. If you want to see any proof of this effect, just pop over to some major blog following the ifollow movement, like that of Randa Clay. Remember, Randa Clay insists that the blog is part of the ifollow movement, although, briefly, the blog will drop the plugin (if it thinks you are a spammer, presumably). All that I saw when one of my blogs joined is a huge increase in Pagerank, due to the link love.

My next point is that so many people agree with this concept, that nofollow should not be used, here, here and here to name but a few- I highly doubt that all these people can be wrong…

The last main point and probably the biggest, is that I want to show you prove to you that nofollow is useless after all. It’s scary how little people know this, but nofollowificated (a word of my own invention) links do aid the site’s ranking, regardless of what you’ve been taught by amateur bloggers/SEOs. Remember, a major factor of a page’s ranking in search results is the link content (the bit between the <a></a>’s). Nofollow does nothing to stop this. So yes, the chances are that you have indeed been outwitted by a bot.

After relentless searching, I came across this article. Written by a person familiar to the concept of web-logging, it describes in depth how exactly link spammers know more than the average blogger, and in fact more than the professional blogger.

You may have noticed legitimate looking comments on your blog from people with suspect names. Usually the name will be a brand name, service or literally anything that sells. The commenter’s website is obviously related to that business. Why do they bother using special keywords when Google is supposed to not follow those links? Do they know something you don’t? Yup. They know that keywords, even on nofollow’ed links, matter. I’d provide reference links to SEO blogs explaining this but then they’d know I’m reading and they might shut up.

So it’s true. Nofollow is useless against spam. Even the creator of the world-famous blogging platform Wordpress agrees that one of the most iconic parts of Wordpress (to SEO ‘artists’, if you can call them that) really doesn’t make any difference.

Remember - it’s the key words, not the actual ‘link juice’ that makes the difference to them. The biggest link spammers normally have very few real backlinks, and pathetic Pagerank, but right up there in the search. Why do you think this happens? That’s exactly right. People putting “this” as their link text (regardless of nofollow), e.g. “Check this out”, actually damage Google’s perspective of their site!

Lastly, I’d like you to note that you’ve all been nofollow’ed, if you’ve been mentioned above! It’s my way of showing that it’s actually useless. I’d install Dofollow if it wasn’t for the PHP processing time (another article, another article….).