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01.14.08
Nofollow Is Not Suited For Wikis
 By Ross Mayfield
There is no such thing as a free link. No matter what the person who is selling you it tells you. And the
web will always adapt to make it so. Even if its hard work.
Barry Schwartz posted Get A Free Link From Wired on an SEO blog, noting that:
The post proceeded to give advice and instructions for how to spam the Wired How To Wiki. And it has been by the SEO community. As a member of the community and working at the provider of its most excellent wiki software, I edited out some of the spam as it didn't meet the goals of the community. But its not that simple.
I believe the intent was to point out an exploit, and not necessarily for bad. The problem rests with nofollow being a good tool for some purposes (blog comment spam) and not for others (wikis in general). I had a quick email exchange with Danny Sullivan and he also talked with Wired and edited the post:
NOTE FROM DANNY: We've talked with Wired about the situation, and they are putting a robots.txt block on links coming out of the wiki so that links won't pass credit. Also, our apologies to Wired in that we've ended up causing a run on the wiki with new pages being created. That was definitely not our intent -- the headline of getting a free link, and the article itself, was more tongue-in-cheek about how the system was and might further get abused, rather than advice for people to really misuse the wiki for promotional purposes. I don't agree with that type of abuse in general, and as someone who has had to deal with it in comments or submissions to our forums, it's no fun. In hindsight, we probably should have just dropped a note pointing out the vulnerability. We've also asked that our test page be completely removed -- it has served its purpose now.
If every website was a wiki I might have edited something similar on their post while disabling the link. Later over a drink with Paolo Valdermin I was joking that we should invent the unfollow link, or make it so any traffic coming from the site doing damage was rejected. But I'm joking and need to digress into a topic most people don't understand:
unfollow was a byproduct of Vote Links, created by Kevin Marks, which I believe I had a hand in at least inspiring. It was designed as a tool for making blog comments not count in Google's PageRank, while letting the blog post's links count. Blog comments are relatively good at dealing with comment spam because of what Clay Shirky described as encapsulation -- every blog has an owner who can determine how to moderate their comments. nofollow is just one way.
Now comments with nofollow enabled get spam anyway, maybe because the fact that the blog host is communicating behind the scenes with search engines is ignored, or that SEO isn't the only goal of the spammer. If you own a blog, you deal with manually sorting through vandalism all the time.
Still, nofollow is a good thing for some Social Software. But it doesn't belong or work everywhere. Can you imagine a web that works as good as today's if every link was tagged with nofollow?
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.
He also writes Ross Mayfield's Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.
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