No Follow

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Summary

An extension to HTML that search engines use to ignore potential LinkSpam.

Overview

In January, 2005, Google, MSN and others announced that they would be supporting a new extension to HTML that blog and wiki systems could use to prevent the search engines from indexing potential WikiSpam.

We strongly support this initiative.

You can read more about the announcement here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

FlexWiki Support

(As of build 1643,) FlexWiki supports the new NoFollow extensions. Administrators can enable this or disable this for a full site by setting the <NoFollowExternalHyperlinks> option in the FederationConfiguration.

Comments / Discussion

In my opinion, rel="nofollow" is a horrible idea.

If I am not mistaken, it will keep Google from calculating PageRank. Websites who want to link but are trying not to let go of any PageRank will start using "nofollow" for all outgoing links, and before long the entire web will have "nofollow" on most links.

Once again, rel="nofollow" is a horrible idea.

MikeSchinkel [2005-Feb-04]

The idea is neither good nor bad, but the way it is implemented could be problematic. As long as folks understand that the tag should only be used for links that get created automatically by things like commenting and trackback features, it could work really well. As a blogger or web master, you'd still be free to create links without the nofollow tag included.

Simple question of user education, methinks. -- Chris Lozac'h [2005-Feb-18]

Sounds like using a tactical nuke when a flyswatter will do. This would be very bad for the important and non-malicious aspects of the blog link economy.

inky [2005-Mar-04]

To Mike's comment. I do not believe people would use nofollow on real (intentional) links for the simple reason that real links are there because you want people to use them. AKA, you are not trying to hide the site you are linking to, and not trying to lower the ranking of that site. If I am company X, competing with Y, I won't place links on my website about Y, or if I do, I'll use nofollow. If I am company X who consumes products of company Y, or company Y produces products based on my products, then I will gladly add links from my site to company Y's site, without the nofollow attribute.

This nofollow thing was really designed to tackle comment spam on blogs. So the blog article contents still contribute to PageRank, but the now the comments (added by anyone) do not. For wikis it's not so useful, since the whole text is editable by anyone.

The nofollow sounds like a nice tool to use if you get many spam posts. Those are not present on most sites though, so I don't think it is something that webmasters by routine should put on all pages with user content.

gyxi, july 05

There's some discussion, including reasons why this will not solve the problem of wiki spam, on this page:

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?NoFollow

There's some more information on the best way to set up search engine indexing on a wiki here:

http://wiki.chongqed.org//NoIndexHistory

Halz [2005-Apr-18]

view this site for more words: http://dressedshock.ilyts.net

Reality

The No-Follow tag has virtually eliminated WikiSpam (Sep 2007)