The nofollow Tag In Blogs

Blog commenting is one of the many methods used by SEO specialists in link building. However, the use of this technique have also lead to malicious methods of SEO which is typically known as spamdexing. Spam in blogs or blog spamming is one of the many spamdexing methods used by webmasters to quickly gain ranks in any search engines, may it be Google or Yahoo!. According to SEO Philippines consultants, this is usually done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Because of this, several solutions have been made to prevent these from happening. One of which is the use of the nofollow tag.

nofollow Tag
The nofollow HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel="nofollow" attribute would not be crawled or influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. The Yahoo and MSN search engines also respect this tag. Using rel="nofollow" is a much easier solution that makes the spamdexing techniques irrelevant to Google ranks.

The disadvantage of the nofollow tag is that link spammers will continue to place links for clicking (by surfers) even if those links are ignored by search engines. According to SEO Philippines consultants, the problem with the nofollow tag is that it only renders a link ineffective, but not block the spam entirely, particularly from automated spamming softwares. Another disadvantage of using the nofollow tag is that it may reduce the value of legitimate comments.

The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content, or for preventing content to be indexed by search engines. The proper methods for blocking search engine spiders to access content on a website or for preventing them to include the content of a page in their index are the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) for blocking access and on-page Meta Elements that are designed to specify on an individual page level what a search engine spider should or should not do with the content of the crawled page.

Other solutions
Other than the use of the nofollow tag, other solutions have also been popularly used to secure their websites and blogs from comment spam. On way is by keyword blocking. Blocking specific words from posts is one of the simplest and most effective ways to reduce spam. Much spam can be blocked simply by banning names of popular pharmaceuticals and casino games. Disallowing links in posts is also one way of reducing comment spams. Redirections is also one way. According to SEO Philippines consultants, instead of displaying a direct hyperlink submitted by a visitor, a web application could display a link to a script on its own website that redirects to the correct URL.