First a little history lesson. The “nofollow” is a tag that can be added by anyone webmaster to certain hyperlinks, and it will tell search engines that they shouldn’t visit that particular link. The practice was actually introduced by the mother of all search engines (okay, that’s not true, but it sure looks like it these days) which we know as Google. In light of recent revelations, I have decided that today is the day that I say enough is enough, and that the experiment with the “nofollow” tag was an honest attempt to achieve something good, but it is now time we realize that it has failed. What are these revelations which spurred this post, you might ask? Well, when I think about it, they aren’t all that recent, but they need to be addressed still!

Today it is common for most blogging platforms to include the nofollow tag in all signature links. In theory this isn’t a bad move, because the intentions of stopping comment spam are noble and in theory it should benefit bloggers. The only problem is that it does neither. Comment spam is as big of a thing as it ever was, but fortunately for us bloggers useful tools like for instance Akismet and Spam Karma have been developed, and they both individually or better yet, in collaboration do a great job filtering out trash comments.

Have you guessed yet who’s taking the heat from the nofollow tag? Of course, it’s those honest commenters who are hard at work with their own blog, that has their link to their own blog ignored by search engines. We as bloggers who use the nofollow tag are indirectly saying that comments are worth nothing to us, and that we are incapable of filtering out comments that add nothing to the conversation ourselves. There is of course the fact that human readers will see links in the comments, but in the future perhaps we can find a tag that stops them from seeing them as well? Oh wait, I think.. well never mind. My point stands that if someone comments on my blog, they deserve the “reward” of search engines reading their signature links, which is why I will soon strip out the nofollow tags from comments-links here on my blog.

Blogs aren’t the only online sites that make use of the nofollow tag however. It has also come to my attention that the good folks over at the internet monstrosity Wikipedia have decided that the nofollow tag is added to each and every external link throughout the site, in an attempt to reduce link-spam. Again we see honest intentions coming in the way of common interest. By doing this, Wikipedia is effectively saying that “OK, this is great and valuable information, we’ll pay you half of what it’s actually worth to use it on our site”. I am appalled by this move that Wikipedia has made. It says that the links to their sources are worth nothing, and if you look at the signals it sends it the fact that it demotes the value of the sources far outweighs the benefits of discouraging link-spam.

Like I said before, the nofollow tag was invented and introduce by Google themselves. What strikes me is the fact that even though blogging software developers have managed to develop systems that seperates spam (which shouldn’t be rewarded) from useful comments (which definately deserves the reward of search engines crawling their links), but Google haven’t and need us to tell them apart for the search engine? Sounds fishy, but we still have the power in our hands at least, and now it is time that we use those powers vested in us by the state of Google to declare death over the nofollow tag.

Update: Thanks to Andy in the comments and his list, I am now certifiably nofollow free! Be sure to check that list out to find your preferred solution for how to get rid of the nofollow tag.