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    Spam in blogs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    0 starsmike | Shared With: Everyone - Mar 27 2008 | seo, google, nofollow, pagerank

    Interesting article on the use (and need for) rel=nofollow links to prevent link spamming. Google appears to be penalizing sites that have what they perceive to be as link spam. One method to remove that risk is to have all user generated links be marked as rel=nofollow. That way, google won't use them in generating PageRank for other web sites.

    The downside is that Google is missing out on a source of content quality - links created only by the motivation in identifying good web sites. If all user-generated content is deprecated, then we only have the "web site publishers" who are ranking the pages on the web. That seems lop-sided and wrong.

    The problem is - when should a user be trusted to not abuse the link generating system. This article discusses various Karma-scoring systems that preferentially remove the nofollow attribute from trusted users.

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    • mohit - Mar 27 2008

      i like the idea of nofollow being the default

    • vanessafox - Mar 28 2008

      Hmm... That's not exactly true. "Web site publishers" can mean anyone these days. For instance, blogs are a big source of links that are used for PageRank calculation.

      Google doesn't penalize sites that have link spam -- Google discounts the value of links that appear to be spam. Which is totally different. Google advocates using nofollow for things like blog comments *not* because otherwise, if you get a bunch of spammy comments through not fault of your own, Google will penalize the site, but because the use of nofollow discourages spammers from cluttering up your site, causing you to have to deal with the spam.

      Spammers watch for sites that allow anyone to post links and hit them relentlessly.

      I think the use of nofollow for UGC content is getting confused with Google's recommendation to use nofollow for paid links. This use goes beyond the original scope of the attribute, which is part of the confusion. If Google finds that a site is selling links in such a way that it's trying to trick Google into using those links for PageRank, it could penalize that site. So one method Google suggests for paid links (in other words, advertising rather than editorial) is the nofollow attribute (although there are other methods that work equally well).

    • mike - Mar 28 2008

      If Google is using an automated system to determin if a "link is sold" - then there is the risk that it will mis-identify UGC spam for paid link spam (and penalize our site). You'd know more than me how much human judgment goes into these decisions.

      Either way, it's useful to us to add nofollow to UGC links to discourage folks that are using us for SEO-only. Our previous policy had sand-boxed users for a while before allowing their links to be "followed" - despite that, we still had aggressive link spammers adding thousands of bogus links to Faves (accomplishing nothing, apparently).

    • vanessafox - Mar 29 2008

      I wouldn't expect the search engines to penalize the site, but I do agree that it's useful to add nofollow to UGC stuff. I like the idea of sandboxing people for a while, although that can be gamed of course.

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