I saw a post today on Jeremey Zawodny’s blog and he mentioned that a year after no-follow was introduced and agreed upon by many of the major blog owners, comment spam is as rife as ever and that there has been a change in how people comment. I made a comment on his blog and thought I’d echo it here on why nofollow is ineffective.

To me, nofollow has always been a token attempt to deal with the issue of information pollution of spam comments and a real solution should be able to discern that a link is spam without a blogger adding a nofollow tag it to his or her blogs. If I am a spammer able to hit 100K or more blogs in one go on something like viagra, I make enough money just off clickthroughs that I am going to do it regardless of the PageRank benefits.

As many have also pointed out, if you don’t lock down 100 percent of the web then the pages that aren’t using nofollow throw off the usefulness of the tag. The search engines need to be better at UNDERSTANDING a comment and seeing that something is spam. I can, you can, and everyone who is mad at spam can, so why can’t Google/Yahoo/MSN and the other billion dollar search companies?

It also seems fair to me that a commenter who leaves a valuable comment SHOULD be given some link juice for being an active member of another person’s blog.

Why?
1. Keywords Bring the Blogger More Traffic: When a commenter adds real discussion to a page, they are enhancing its unique text and possible keywords for the page to be discovered. This means more traffic, visitors, and potential $$$ for the blogger who is allowing comments. Why shouldn’t good users be rewarded for their contribution to someone else’s site?

2. Blog Owners Need to Police Their Own Land: A blog is a living thing. If you don’t want a comment, delete. A blog filled with comment spam (automatic or manual) just shows the blogger isn’t paying enough attention. We must all tend our own garden.

3. Blogs Deserve MORE Juice: Some have speculated Google et al wanted nofollow to help push down the rankings of blogs and blog owners in order to allow more “mainstream” sites to appear. Not sure if its true or not, but to me, blogging is the next wave of the web. I find more great things through blog posts then most sites. Everyone is an expert at something, and I think the SE’s shouldn’t be hindering blog participation and link value.I’m going to take a look at my own Wordpress blog here and see about changing the tag. Seems only fair to give credit where credit is due.