Since the creation of the nofollow tag, there has been much debate over the validity of it. But, lately many SEO professionals are speaking out against it. Add Loren Baker’s rant against nofollow to the against pile. Loren gives 13 great reasons not to use nofollow, and he is absolutley right. I’ve never really said what I think about this, but I agree with him. I do not intentionally use it, but I use Wordpress so I guess my blog comments have it. I moderate all comments anyway, plus I have Askimet, so as Loren says it’s irrelevant.

Google created the nofollow tag with good intentions of stopping comment spam on blogs. Two years later, it hasn’t worked, and Google is now using fear tactics to get webmasters to use it by basically saying “use nofollow or your links won’t count.” This is the equivalent of SEO blackmail. (Hey, cool idea for a domain name!)

It’s time for a new solution. Google has a history of solving problems with software. So why are they relying on webmasters to solve a problem they should be trying to solve on their own? I would guess that the non-SEO educated has no idea what nofollow is anyway. Come on Google, wise up and listen to us. Nofollow does not work. Do what you do best and use the data you are already collecting to make your own determination on the authority of links.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 4:33 am and is filed under Link Building, SEO. 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.