Mail spam isn’t the only kind of spam out there. The proliferation of blogs have given birth to Blog Spam, where spammers go from one blog to another posting comments that have links to commercial sites. This sort of spam accomplishes two things: (1) It puts a link to the spammer’s site on the web site of someone else, even if that person has no connection to the spam site; and (2) it increases the ranking of the spam site on search engines such as Google, because it increases the number of sites linking to the spam site.
This has prompted major search engines to introduce the new indexing command “nofollow”. It’s used like so:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com” rel=”nofollow”>
Google, et al rank a web site partly by counting the number of other web sites link to it. However, if they see “nofollow” in a link, it disregards that particular link. Livejournal, WordPress (which powers this site) and other blog services and applications have adapted nofollow. So whenever someone posts a comment that contains a link, nofollow is automatically added in the <a> tag.
I like to utilize nofollow even when posting content on my own sites. For instance, when I’m referring to a site that I don’t like. I’ll point you to it, but I won’t help its Google ranking.
Some people don’t think nofollow was a good idea, and that it doesn’t really prevent spam. But it’s here, and I’ll use it.
