Click Sentry Blog

In case you have been living in a cave, you don’t care or you don’t have a blog, then you have surely noticed that search engines like Yahoo! are showing links to sites that have the “link condom” or rel=”nofollow” attribute on them.  This has been going on for some time now and there is just starting to be some chatter here and there about it.  It is kind of a shame and a blessing at the same time. I think that the blogging community, aka the blogosphere, has really benefitted and showed the rest of the web how things should be. You link to something because it has value and is probably related to what you are writing about. Since traditional webmasters and SEO types became aware of Page Rank and how it can affect a site’s rankings or juice, linking out has become more and more guarded. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Google stopped showing realtime toolbar PR (I am sure there are a bunch of reasons).  Removing some of the incentive webmasters have to link out to other sites and resources on the web. Of course there are going to be sites that are unrelated to yours that you link to, but is this a bad thing? I don’t think so. A vote is a vote and now that the webmaster community at large is more educated with regards to how search engines like Google use the power of links and anchor text to help something rank, I think we are all better off. This is why I think forgetting about the nofollow attribute is a good thing. But, there is also a downside.

Of course, this means that comment spam is going to become more and more of an issue in the near future.  Clearly, many of these types have been aware of the apparent lack of use of the nofollow attribute for some time as comment spam seemed to pick up a bit about two months ago for me. Clearly, the brilliant minds behind these schemes knew about this before most of the world.

I for one am glad to see the nofollow attribute fall out of favor.  People should be free with what they link to. If you like it, link it. My 2 cents.

tags: no+follow, seo, spam, blogging

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 1:54 pm and is filed under SEO, Linking, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.