The NoFollow link attribute (rel=”nofollow”) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, due to the amount of blog comment spamming.

The theory is that if spammers are spamming in blog comments to get better SEO and anchored links for their sites, NoFollow would render such spam useless. Problem is, spammers still spam.

And on the other front, Ahmed Bilal, in response with Defending NoFollow Against Angry SEOs:

Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years – it’s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.

Apart from Blogger spam (and their plans to control all of the world’s information and then sell it to the highest bidder ), NoFollow is possibly an issue that gets Google the worst possible press.

But is NoFollow really that bad a move, or is it something that’s being used to beat Google over the head by people who have grudges against Google?

Now, in general, my feelings are that nofollow has proved to be entirely useless as a method to prevent spam. It’s vaguely possible that spam would be 10 times worse today than it is had nofollow not been employed on many blogs by default…but I doubt it. Nofollow, however, does have perfectly valid and understandable uses. Ahmed exposes the most interesting value to the nofollow microformat by pointing out the actual purpose it carries:

Anti-spam plugins prevent spammers from posting spam on our blogs. NoFollow prevents spammy comments from polluting the search engines. There’s an important distinction – Google’s responsibility is to guarantee the best possible results. When did fighting the world’s spam fall under their responsibilities?

NoFollow was never expected to stem the tide of spam: it was, however, hoped to reduce the amount of spam in search indexes, allowing searchers to more easily retrieve valuable information.

Whether that has been a success is, certainly, a very different question. But that is the question we need to analyze in order to determine whether NoFollow has really been of any use, not whether more or less spam has been unleashed on the world; but whether we can find that spam in Google’s search index.

Now, this is a difficult question to test. This is far from the only means that Google uses to stop spam – the fact that you can’t find the spam sites which are being linked to in your spam comments using Google doesn’t necessarily mean that NoFollow had anything to do with it. If you’re anything like me, no spam comment has ever been on your blog long enough to be indexed. So, in order to identify spam which has been blocked by NoFollow, it seems you’d need to confirm the following points:

1. This spam site has been successfully linked to using the NoFollow microformat.
2. This spam site has only been linked to using the NoFollow microformat.
3. This spam site has not been removed from the Google index using some other means.

And I’m not sure whether we can do that. Google may be able to; but I can’t.

Hello,

I visited your website today and noticed that you can benefit from more original content.

I can easily make your web site more successful by adding hundreds of web pages to your site with fresh, original content. It’s an easy formula for success: More web pages with great content attracts lots of visitors that generate profit for your website.

Forget about spending hours upon hours writing content for your website or paying hundreds of dollars for a professional writer.

My service can help.

Well thanks, Article Chief, for that enlightening information. I had no idea that my website was lacking in original content. I mean, here I thought that I’d been writing new and unique content for the last 10 months!

If this was actuall submitted by hand, I would say this is badly mistargeted marketing.

However, it’s equally likely that it was actually submitted automatically: so in reality, it’s untargeted marketing. Spam. As spam goes, it’s pretty legitimate: it’s well written, it’s got a name attached to it, and it’s provided contact information (email.) But, like most spam, it’s also entirely irrelevant to my needs. And, because it’s been so badly mistargeted, the end result is that I’m reading this blog post – providing negative information about Article Chief and their marketing practices which will now be available indefinitely online.

Providing a spam service requires spam marketing, I guess. If you are selling a service which nobody really wants, you just need to market widely in order to have a chance to sell anything. Frankly, you’d be better off coming up with a legitimate business model.

Article Chief offers webmasters 300 pages of content each month for $29 per month. I immediately note that the first and second paragraph specify “original content” – but when it comes to statements explicitly about what the service offers, the word “original” is no longer present. Suspicious, isn’t it? Rather than reselling hundreds articles every month, why not spend your time writing a few pages of truly original writing and sell your services as a professional copywriter? Instead of spending your effort on untargeted marketing efforts, work on building a professional reputation: truly market yourself and your services rather than preying on unsuspecting webmasters.

Thanks, Article Chief: but I’m afraid I won’t be requiring your services.

Every once in a while, however, I do receive some kind of comment which is very suggestive of spam – in the form of blatant marketing.

Today, for example, I received the following comment on a follow-up post I wrote about Dumbfind’s advertising program:

I think DumbFind is great, Congrads guys. Check out our recent web portal. Sprinko.com is a Fun way to search the web for news, images, articles, encyclopedia, dictionary and videos. Displays mini site images on all search results for better efficiency and site decision. Sprinko Note is a fast and easy way to paste content and send to an email with one click, no log-in required. Double click on any word and instant definition will pop-up

Now, does this read like sincere commentary? Not especially. It’s certainly not timely – since the original post was written in April of 2006. No, it reads like what I’m going to choose to call marketing spam.

Comment spam seems to be divided into a couple of categories – complete garbage (nonsense words pasted together) and publicity-raising. There’s a whole spectrum between the two, transitioning all the way into some very sincere and well-worded comments which are possibly made purely to get the person’s name or website better known. The challenge can be in identifying that middle-ground where a comment transitions from useful to spam.

This comment I received falls directly into the spam category. Why? Because it doesn’t even make more than a half-hearted effort to reference the post. The 7 word statement which relates to Dumbfind hardly manages to indicate any relationship to my thoughts. There’s no transition of any kind before the author breaks straight into marketing spiel, and no "real person" is associated with the comments.

Interestingly enough, this spam comment is not apparently for links. The comments contained no links; and the url supplied was for the profile of the Sprinko Blogspot account. Overall, a three-click trace to actual reach the Sprinko web portal.

So what has this comment accomplished?

Well, it’s made me aware of the Sprinko.com web portal. I did, in fact, go to the site. It was about what I expected; a fairly generic web portal with a couple uninspiring extra features. I’m not going to take the time to review it in any serious way for two reasons. First, my first impressions are that the site is pretty amateurish. Everything I see is fairly average. Second, I’m not willing to spend a lot of time on a site which uses this kind of marketing technique. My intent, originally, was to write a vitriolic review – but the site doesn’t actually merit that. It’s nothing special, either in a positive or a negative light.

Ultimately, what’s the worse review – a passionate complaint, or a shrug of the shoulders and dismissal?

Google news provides excellent, high-quality results and has stringent requirements for news providers. Average feed scrapers scrape, well, whatever they can find. But can an algorithm tell the difference?

Tim notes, in particular, the interesting recursive nature of searching aggregators. Since many aggregators are scraping results from other search engines, it’s not impossible to have some very complex results.

As an in-between case ask yourself this: if you’re doing a websearch (on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, …) do you want any of the results to be … search-result pages themselves (from Google, Yahoo!, MSN)? That is, if you search for “snorklewacker” on MSN web search, and you click on result #4, do you want to find yourself looking at a websearch results page for “snorklewacker” on Yahoo! Search, which in turn has (as result #3) the Google search results page for “snorklewacker”?

Altogether, an interesting question – no really conclusive answers, however.

Does this theory also apply to websites?

There are a number of problems in determining how to apply this kind of theory. When dealing with people, it’s clear that people know a relatively small and finite group of acquaintances. With websites, there are certain sites (directories and search engines, for example) who are linked to enormous numbers of sites. Thus, it is ineffective to treat the six degrees meme in web terms at the site level – instead, it must be treated at the page level. A link to Google.com’s index now means only a link to a handful of other Google properties.

This idea occurred to me as a means of identifying your proximity to any given spam website resource. It would be intriguing to analyze particular pages and trace the number of connections necessary to get from your page to a known spam or banned website.

There are a number of technological barriers to this, of course. Google contains all the information one would need to do this – but is it possible to access it? I’m not sure it is – you’d need to be able to determine whether Google had flagged a site and you’d need to be able to identify the tracks of Google’s crawler to determine the site path. It’s certainly possible to program your own, as well – but well beyond my puny programming skills!

Is the good link/bad link dichotomy accurate? I wouldn’t think so. The scale of link quality, in my opinion, is really made up of shades of gray – one link may be the darkest pits of Hades, but another may be more like a slightly off-color joke. Not something you’d say in front of your parents, but only really inappropriate in certain company.

The six degrees meme could be one way of determining the potential quality of a linking site, or of identifying the existence of Googlebowling (if such a thing is indeed possible.) It could perhaps also be a way of determining the risk of a site becoming associated with questionable sites – if a site has a number of pages which are currently only 2 degrees separated from highly questionable sites, this suggests that their existing link partners are making poor choices, which may come to reflect on the site itself.

If you engage in link exchange – be careful. You never know who else your link partners might be exchanging with. (I guess this could apply to many other things, as well!)