No Follow, No Credit

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch has recently had much to say about the idea of a nofollow attribute to help combat spam in blogs. Today, we learned that all the major engines, in their first cooperative effort in nearly a decade, will be implementing a <rel=”nofollow”> attribute. The tag will be recognized by the engines as a link with no value and they will not count it toward their popularity calculations.

Bloggers have long been plagued with spammers filling their comment pages with links. Guestbooks fell victim to the same and it resulted in their almost total devaluation by the search engines. But blogs are often sources of very good information and links so throwing them out altogether would not be a good idea. Hence the nofollow attribute. It’s a good move to give bloggers control where they were powerless before. Danny has a detailed explanation of how it will work.

Who knows? It may even cut down on spam.

Susan Esparza is former managing editor at Bruce Clay Inc., and has written extensively for clients and internal publications. Along with Bruce Clay, she is co-author of the first edition of Search Engine Optimization All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies.

See Susan's author page for links to connect on social media.