It is sometimes difficult to comprehend that it has been over twelve years since Google first came out with the answer to spamming in the form of the 'nofollow' tag. This in internet terms is a very long time, so it is doubly surprising that people are getting quite upset about it now, and for good reason. With the proliferation of blogging around the world, more and more people are getting to terms with SEO and the importance of inbound links, this in turn has resulted in a tidal wave of dubious methods of obtaining links, spam comments being one of them.
Now, I have always developed and designed sites specifically for hosted servers and the SalesVision blog that I regularly contribute to is also hosted on our servers, so I only came accross this problem very recently when I decided to dabble with a personal blog on blogger. The problem as I see it, is that free blogging software is open to abuse, but is also the only option available to someone who cannot afford to host their own blogging platform or server space. Yet, that doesn't mean that those people's voice or opinion matters less than someone who can host their own site.
Spamming is an increasingly big problem and terribly annoying but the answer is not to cut every person's voice. Nofollow is in effect social censorship in that in order to prevent one part of a community from breaking the rules, everyone suffers. I don't doubt the intentions behind the action, but the internet is a place where ideas are shared and networks and communities are created. I know that without the incentive of creating relevant linking then discussions themselves will evaporate. I for one am more than willing to cope with some spam or look for other methods of dealing with it than preventing social commentary.
I am terribly new to 'no follow' and I would like to thank Andy Beards list of nofollow remedies which in turn pointed me to webstractions blogger 'nofollow' removal tip . I would also highly recommend the bumpzee nofollow community where I found all this information.
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I have found that since removing No Follow I haven't see a "significant" increase in the number of spam comments on my blog. Akismet does a fairly decent job of filtering out the worst stuff, and moderation takes care of the borderline content.
I definitely believe that the benefits of removing No Follow far outweigh the negatives.
Steve,
Web 2.0 Split Open | How To Split An Atom
My blog is too new to have been noticed by spammers, and I am barricading the doors as we speak in preperation. On the corporate blog that I contribute to spamming is a problem, however, I would rather have the dialogue between people than cut it off completely.