The html tag rel=”nofollow” is the subject to todays little rant. This has to be one of the most pointless aspects of HTML and something all search engines should ignore. The rel=”nofollow” HTML tag basically tells a search engine bot to ignore the link, so apart from a small about of traffic the link is pointless.

The No Follow link attribute, rel=”nofollow”, was created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, due to the amount of blog comment spamming. For the search engines it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. It has been added to all external links at Wikipedia, due to the amount of spamming which can easily take place there.

Loren Baker gives thirteen reasons why the No Follow tag sucks, and I intend to expand upon them.

1. NoFollow = NoWorky. Using NoFollow in blog comments, the original intent of the tag, does nothing to discourage comment spammers. Using other anti-spamming tools such as question, math and plugins such as Akismet and SpamKarma for Wordpress is much more effective.

This is bang on the nail as far as I am concerned. It does not matter if your blog uses the No Follow link or not. Savvy webmasters and SEO (Search Engine Optimising) users will know that your site is not worth commenting on for the link; however, these people are just a small minority. Every day people go out and buy 'link spamming' programs and bots, which will still spam these No Follow enabled sites.

You see even if a link has no value to the search engines, it will still PUSH TRAFFIC. So the No Follow tag simply weakened spamming bots and programs, but did not nullify them.

Reason 11, states that even Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg agrees that this tag does not work:

In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.

The tags usefulness deteriorates when you read reason 12:

Search Engines follow NoFollow. Yahoo has been known to count NoFollow links as backlinks in SiteExplorer. So, if you’re goal in comment spamming to to build backlinks, which builds your site’s value in terms of selling advertising (TLA, ReviewMe, SEOmoz’s PageStrength and other metrics programs use Yahoo Backlinks as valued criteria), NoFollow is useless.

So because the search engines do not universally recognise the tag, it still has value. Thus, it is still profitable to spam No Follow enabled blogs and web pages.

In addition the usage of No Follow reduces the users motivation to comment on blogs as there's only a small benefit from commenting on someone else’s blog entry, as since their links would not be recognised by the premier search engine. Nice work on killing off the so called "Web 2.0" and Web interaction Google.

But here is the killer reason, which is not in the original blog post. There is no actual point to use the rel=”nofollow” tag, as there are spam prevention methods that work. No Follow attempts to fix spam in the wrong way; it lets you spam, but reduces the effectiveness of the spam. Why not simply kill spam in the first place?

If you ever visited Tech Rant in the past, you will have noticed I personally have had trouble with spam bots. First I had commenting enabled for anybody and, well quite obviously, I got spammed -- badly. Then I forced registration, the spammers seemed to have a solution to that too, only a couple of days later the spam re-occurred, this time by registered users. Now I use a plug-in called Askimet in combination with BadBehaviour. With these two plug-ins -- whilst still allowing any user to comment -- I have not seen any spam. Even if someone manages to spam a couple of comments, it's hardly much work to check your comments logs every now and again is it?

This is precisely why rel=”nofollow”, or No Follow, is a pointless HTML tag. Spam can be kept at bay if the webmaster, or blog-master, simply implements a few plug-ins and looks at their logs every now and again. Spam is not to be feared, if you know what you are doing. Heck, I can even prevent it in PostNuke, more popular Content Management Systems and Blogging software (such as Wordpress or Blogger,) should have a greater range of plug-ins to utilise in their short fight against spam. Thus, if every site worth spamming would simply protect themselves, there would be no place for the monstrosity that is No Follow.