What’s the fuss about “No Follow”?

Lately, the concept of NoFollow attribute in the industry of search engine optimization seems to be losing its significance due to numerous intelligent reasons. However, those who have tasted success with the support of this concept, surely stand out on a huge scale. Hence, an interesting combat over the issue of “value of no follow links” has profoundly emerged.

Before I start highlighting the main reasons responsible for demanding the failure of NoFollow links, let us have a look at the emergence and theoretical aspect of the same.

NoFollow was introduced with the motive of instructing certain search engines about the hyperlinks that should not regulate the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. Mainly, the purpose was to eliminate the potential of certain search engine spam so that the quality of search engine results get improvised and prevention of spam indexing can be avoided, for example : Spammers spam in blog comments to achieve better search engine optimization results.

However, now, the idea of NoFollow has generated various other features beyond simple blog comments as wikipedia is employing NoFollow for external links and Google suggests that paid links are also using the NoFollow attribute on a large extent.
Some of the other basic reasons for NoFollow fiasco are as follows:

• In the concept of blog comments, the latest anti spamming tools such as question, maths and plugins(Akismet, SpamKarma) are considered as much more effective options than the usual NoFollow links as it does nothing with the original intent of the tag and thus comment spammers are left unaffected.
• If there is no value in terms of search engine indexing, then the significance of NoFollow on sites, text ads, and blogs appears more or less minutia.
• If some information is linked with NoFollow attribute, then people usually take it as an unreliable source or something that cannot be trusted completely.
• On WordPress blogs, use of Nofollow links remains unnoticed by most of the bloggers while commenting, simply because it is set as default.
• NoFollow creates lot of confusion in the deciding pattern of leading search engines, as experienced index webmasters fail to settle that whether NoFollow all outgoing links from their website to prevent it from page rank leakage or not. Hence, it could be a risky option for many websites.
• NoFollow has been declared as an “ineffective search engine’s solution” to hide its own failure to rank websites appropriately. Hence, a more smart technique of identifying and devaluing links to spam sites should be discovered.
• Commenting on a blog post mainly offers the idea of adding more relevant information to that blog post. However, this may lead to pages of comments in form of a debate. Moreover, now a trick is used to build the site’s content through posting comments, which has a professional courtesy to give them some link love.
• On Wikipedia, the use of NoFollow links is almost insignificant.
• Any thing that you need to spread on Google such as Text link advertisements, does not need a NoFollow link.

Recently, the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg also acknowledged the failure of NoFollow.
Moreover, Yahoo, a leading search engine does count NoFollow links as backlinks in SiteExplorer, but still, all those trying to build backlinks through comment spammingare are in total loss because it builds your site’s value in terms of selling advertising options. For instance: TLA, ReviewMe, SEOmoz’s PageStrength and other metrics programs use Yahoo Backlinks as valued criteria.

And finally, in order to add a touch of practical experiment to this notion of “NoFollowlinks failure”, Matt Cutts presents an example to search how each search engine deals with the command. His experiment states that:

• Google totally negates the visibility of the page in search results, similar is the case with Ask.

• MSN is little lenient and thus, offers an url reference and Cached link, without any snippet. On clicking the cached link, nothing new will flash on the screen.
• Yahoo, offers the same result, where on clicking the cached link, the cached page returns.

Therefore, by now, the complete conception of NoFollow is in doldrums, where experts find its significance eliminating day by day.