Are You Following Me?

The controversial ‘no-follow’ tag has been adopted by Google and most of the other search-engines now. What does this mean you?  Well, that depends on whether you’re a spammer or a blogger!

WHAT DO THE SEARCH-ENGINES SAY?

The good people at Google, Yahoo and MSN seem to be consolidated in their views of the use of the no-follow tag for the following reasons. Bloggers and readers of blogs alike realize that there are many people who are quite ruthless about getting their own website ranked higher in the search-rankings by getting links BACK to their own websites.

While this is perfectly legitimate and is desirable by the various blogging communities, these people simply leave ‘spam’ comments on other people’s blogs.  What is considered spam in regard to comments? As an example, you might have a blog that is dedicated to dogs, or a particular breed of dog.  A ruthless spammer might leave a comment with a link back to his or her website that says something like “Great post; check out my site at http:// etc.” and the link is to a sales page selling something totally unrelated to the blog where the comment was left, perhaps pharmaceuticals or similar.

WHO BENEFITS?

If you think about this, it’s worthless to everybody other than the owner of the site selling the pharmaceuticals.  The blog-owner doesn’t have any additional content; the blog-reader might waste some time checking a site that is of no interest and then might conclude that the blog-owner’s site isn’t worth visiting again because of these spam backlinks.

This is where the ‘no-follow’ tag comes in. Blog platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal and several others have agreed to include the ‘no-follow’ attribute in their software, though you CAN turn this off in most of them.  They agreed to include the simple piece of code rel=”nofollow”.   The effect is just as simple; whenever a comments is left on somebody’s blog that has the ‘no-follow’ attribute left on, the comment would be, in effect, invisible to the search-engine.

A CLOAK OF INVISIBILITY

This invisibility-cloak mean that the search-engines spiders (crawler-programs) wouldn’t follow that link back to the site and so would not include it in that particular search-engine’s ranking.

The logic is simple; if the spammer knows that the link won’t be followed and therefore won’t positively affect his or her rankings, why bother to spam blogs in the first place!  That’s the logic. Now for the reality.

There are at least two reasons why this may not discourage spammers.  Firstly, they don’t all KNOW about the no-follow attribute, so they go on with their spamming attempt out of ignorance.  Secondly, they often use software to automatically spam blogs with a  standard comment like “Great post” etc. so they aren’t really putting any effort and time into it anyway, which means that they aren’t losing anything by leaving their programs running on auto-pilot.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

So the question now is, will this have a positive or negative effect on blogging communities?

To answer that, I think we need to understand human nature.  The crawler programs used by Google,Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN may well ignore these links, but will people ignore them?

It’s inevitable that some people WILL ignore them, and it’s equally inevitable that others will follow the links, sometimes just out of curiosity.  However, once these people who have followed a couple of links realize that they are not at all relevant to the blog that they are reading, they are most likely to stop following these in the future unless the link is posted by somebody that they know and trust, or somebody that they have heard about.

FREELOADERS

Like most other human endeavors, there will ALWAYS be some people who try to get something for nothing, and these people just make it more difficult for the honest people who have integrity.

What’s the answer?  Well, the no-follow tag is a start, but what it comes down to is this; as a blogger, you will have to create increasingly better quality content to keep your readers coming back.  As the owner of another site, you will have to ensure that the quality of your comments are such that, even though the search-engines don’t see your link as relevant, the people READING your comment will see enough value to come to your website willingly.

After all, you CAN have a lot of visitors to your website WITHOUT having a high search-engine ranking!

Luke.

PS. Your Christmas gift will be in my post tomorrow!