Truth 28. Putting the kibosh on link love with nofollow links
As blogging has risen in popularity, so has blog spam. Bloggers often load blog entries with links and comment spam. The goal, of course, is to link to other websites and pages to boost those external sites’ link juice and to boost search engine PageRank. In other words, the system of using hyperlinks to “vote” for the usefulness or relevancy of sites has been abused—often egregiously—by spammers hawking dubious wares and services.
Enter the “nofollow” tag, introduced by Google in 2005. The promise of the nofollow tag was not to stop spam (which itself is all but unstoppable), but rather to remove any of the link love value in a link in blog comments. The nofollow tag tells ...
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