Dofollow, nofollow and the link building "industry"

[Kay]

We're all familiar with comment spam on blogs and forums, and I've no doubt we all hate it. But it seems there's a whole industry built around it. You know the type of thing - get a million links for $29.99! And this is often achieved by outsourcing the work to people in poorer economies who spend their days copying and pasting rubbish onto forums and blogs, or perhaps they post fluff or copy and paste stuff to get their forum sigs seen.

Why people are daft enough to buy such "services" I don't know. But quite obviously, they do buy.

Now, if the web keeps going nofollow - as discussed earlier - then this is going to completely devalue this dodgy link building activity. I would love to see these "link building" companies put out of business. But there again if they have plenty of clients who are stupid enough to buy these links now, it's unlikely they would even know the difference between dofollow and nofollow.

Do you think that as nofollow increases, we may see less of this kind of spam?

(Please don't just answer "no". )

[grynge]

Do you think that as nofollow increases, we may see less of this kind of spam?

I would say spam is here forever. I have seen all matter of bad spam from idiots and here in Australia we have quite a decent spam law (against Australian companies) which I use to good effect when I receive spam from an Australian Company but even then it doesn't stop them from sending it out. If you were to ask most people if they thought sending an email from their work to another person/company about their work, they would say that isn't spam, but it is under the definition (Australia's) of spam. Lucky for most companies ACMA (the regulator) sends a warning first if they receive a complaint.

Having or not having the nofollow tag will not even be understood by most people. Unless you have a nofollow highlighter plugin most people will not even see it.

[Clinton]

Now, if the web keeps going nofollow - as discussed earlier - then this is going to completely devalue this dodgy link building activity.

If the entire web goes nofollow all comment spam and forum spam would stop as the incentive disappears.

Also, search engines will have no links to guide them and will actually have to do some work. Perhaps they'd hire a few million employees to hand sort SERPs. Or find some other way.

From one perspective there'd be a big improvement: massively reduced bot activity. Many of us could simply block all bots.

But this assumes 100% nofollow. That, of course, won't happen. There must be millions of webmasters who've never heard of nofollow and there are millions of forgotten and long-ignored sites that the webmasters aren't going to update with no-follow tags.

What will happen is that webmasters in the know, people who are doing SEO, will be the ones who have nofollow on some links and dofollow on others. Over a period of a few years it will be possible to easily pick out all the webmasters who do SEO (otherwise known in search engine circles as "The Enemy") i.e. everyone who has a nofollow on their site. Then an algo can be applied to negatively impact all these sites either for "selling links" without involving Adwords ...or simply for performing SEO.

While all that is happening the career spammers will be working on other ways of spamming. And SEs will require owners of good sites to take more and more steps to help the search engines do their job. You're obviously interested in helping them - you installed nofollows. Compiling a database of prospective customers is simply a matter of finding all sites using nofollow. Helping the SEs could take the form of installing more meta tags, installing the SE's script on every page, signing up to an long and restrictive agreement with the SE to be considered in their index, paying for the SE to escalate the review ...

[JJMcClure]

Why people are daft enough to buy such "services" I don't know.

I do, or at least I have what I think is a pretty water tight theory that's widely accepted, but I have to be careful here in case my post is seen as a gratuitous 'I love Google' post. It's not, this is simply my understanding of how the Google Organic search concept is set up and has nothing to do with liking or disliking them.

The reason people buy those links is simply that they dont' get how Google works. Google is based on 'quality' and the SERP works because Google are better than anyone else at being able to recognise signals for quality and they of course are mostly your incoming backlinks because they're votes for your page. So, from the early days when it was the number of links you had that mattered, to today when links are judged on an individual basis, links matter hugely.

Buying or creating crap links from directories and blogs etc is simply not going to work in the long term because Google (with techniques like nofollow and constant algo tweaks) are getting better at weeding out the crap so it's a strategy that's ultimately doomed to failure. I wouldn't want to depend on a ranking that in turn depended on spammy links. The best way to ensure long term success in the Google SERP is to have a genuinely useful resource that acquires the kind of good quality genuine links that Google will reward with a high ranking and that's what good SEO is. If the SERP is full of spam, people stop using Google and we all lose out so faking the signasl that earn good rankings means essentially doing the thing you'd do actually do that would get good rankings. Oh wait, did Google just not create a situation where I the best way to benefit myself long term is to do exactly what they want me to do? Clever.