OddThinking

I was checking the semantics of HTML’s rel=”nofollow” attribute the other day. While doing so, I stumbled across the No NoFollow wiki site, and learnt a few lessons.

To start with, there is a whole movement of web-masters I didn’t know existed: People who hate the “nofollow” attribute! They particularly object to it in its most common incarnation – in blog comments.

Spurious Reasons

Unfortunately, the 11 listed reasons given to not use the attribute are largely spurious and repetitive rationalisations.

For example, just because your site isn’t given a boost to its PageRank doesn’t “eliminate the dissemination of free speech”. Remember: even in the countries that recognise a right to free speech, they protect the right to speak, not some mythical right to have people pay attention to you when you speak.

Here’s another example of spuriousness. They lobby that, because “nofollow” is confusingly named, others should not use it. I support the concept of naming attributes clearly (see my opinions on the “alternate” versus “alternative” attribute debate), but I wouldn’t tell others to abandon an attribute out of spiteful pedantism.

A third example: just because “nofollow” is not directly useful to the human reader, doesn’t make it perfectly valid markup. It is no reason to abandon it.

Wiki Weakness

The Wiki format isn’t working for anyone here. The basic propositions are lost in a sea of rebuttals and counter-points. It is difficult to understand where it all started, and who is disagreeing with who. (Here’s an egregious example – at least at the time of writing.)

A wiki is a great place to have a consensus, but an awful place to have a disagreement.

Plugin Support

There are a few WordPress plugins out there to change the NoFollow behaviour. Some eliminate it. Others recognise that spam-proof fences don’t exist yet, and leave a nofollow tag in for a few days until the moderator has had a chance to clean up any remaining spam.

Forming My Own Opinion

I went away from the site dismissing it as net-foolishness, but my thoughts did come back to it over the next few days, and I have gradually changed my mind over to a compromise position.

My first premise is that I want to treat my fellow-blogging comment writers well for two reasons – I want to encourage comments on my blog and I want to be treated well by others when I comment on their blogs.

Posting a (non-spam) comment here increases the value of my blog. While I don’t feel ethically obliged to include references to my commenter’s web-sites, I am happy to do so (within the bounds of good taste) as a small reward for posting a comment here. If their comment is interesting, perhaps readers will follow the link to learn more about the commenter.

However, I have slowly come to realise something: Just because you have a web-page and you comment on my blog does not mean your web-page is more worthwhile to web-surfers as a whole. You don’t deserve better PageRank merely for posting an unrelated comment on a different blog. You do deserve PageRank when other people reference your site.

Therefore, the behaviour I desire from a NoFollow plugin is:

• If the commenter enters their URL in the appropriate field in the submission form, display it to the readers with the NoFollow attribute.
• However, don’t use the NoFollow attribute on links to arbitrary blogs entered in the comment body text itself!
• However, do use the NoFollow tag for the first week or two that a comment appears in case a spam gets through.
  Some people argue that extra PageRank doesn’t help spam, so this rule isn’t necessary. They may well be right, but I am not yet convinced by their arguments, so I want to play it safe.
• [Desirable, optional requirement] Manually approved “ham” comments need not have the week’s protection.

When I find a plugin that implements this behaviour, I will install it here.