03 Apr 06

‘Nofollow’ & Paid Links

In Web Development

The 'nofollow' tag was introduced by Google at the start of 2005 solely as a means of 'preventing blog spam'. In other words, to stop people using automated scripts which post gibberish in weblog comment areas in order to get a link back to their site. The basic idea being that if Google spotted a link tagged with 'nofollow' then it wouldn't consider it a 'vote' for the site being linked to in the way it does with normal links. Therefore the spammer's site wouldn't benefit in the SERPs from the link and as a result he or she would give up their evil ways and concentrate on making nice fluffy sites about puppies and ice cream, using only search engine approved 'white hat' techniques.

Great idea, eh? Well maybe in theory. Personally I feel that blog owners should take responsibility for the comments on their site and ensure that any 'spam' comments are deleted very quickly or moderated before being approved for general consumption. I also think that anyone who takes the time to comment on a post deserves a 'proper' link back to their site. But that's not my main point.

Last week Matt Cutts, more or less the public face of Google, posted the following on his blog:

Q: "If one were to offer to sell space on their site (or consider purchasing it on another), would it be a good idea to offer to add a NOFOLLOW tag so to generate the traffic from the advertisement, but not have the appearence of artificial PR manipulation through purchasing of links?"
A: Yes, if you sell links, you should mark them with the nofollow tag. Not doing so can affect your reputation in Google.

Riiiight. So the official policy is that nofollow should be used on paid links, 'or else'. The first thing that strikes me is that paid links have nothing whatsoever to do with blog spam and that they are perfectly legitimate. Equally you would assume sites wouldn't accept advertisers if they weren't willing to 'vouch for them' so to speak.

Point number two would be that Google make almost all of their revenue from advertising. If publishers added nofollow to their paid links then the advertisers would potentially lose out on improved organic search results - one of the few things Google can't (or at least doesn't) offer advertisers. That then reduces even further the number of reasons not to advertise with Google. Coincidence?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, here's a quote from the Google webmaster guidelines:

"Make pages for users, not for search engines."

Isn't that a bit hypocritical then?

Whilst nofollow may have been a nice idea in theory it isn't working in practice, and with talk of 'reputation' penalties in Google it certainly doesn't seem to be helping site now - the opposite in fact. Personally I will keep doing my job as normal and leave Google to do theirs.

(On a related note, Threadwatch have an interesting post up demonstrating some of the bizarre uses of nofollow currently floating around.)

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