Recently I came across the yesfollow project. This is a campaign against “rel=nofollow” attribute usage in blog comments. I can identify with their sentiments, but I don’t agree with them completely. Anyone who adds value to a blog entry by adding meaningful comments do deserve the credit, but only if his comment is related to the content he has on his own site! (For example, if I have a blog on chess and if I comment on a blog which deals with politics, should I get the link credit? I don’t think so!) 

If you are not clear about this whole issue, I will explain it for you.

Whenever you search on a keyword in Google, the web pages returned are based on the Google page ranking. The pages with highest rank will appear first and hence will get more traffic.

Now how is this pagerank determined? One of the key parameters is how many Websites link to your blog or Website. If many people refer your Website, you will have a better pagerank. This is a cool idea and in most cases will ensure that most relevant pages are displayed for a search keyword.

As blogs started appearing in internet scene, people realized that by commenting to blogs, they can increase their pagerank. So spammers started using automated tools to bombard blogs with comments. Soon it was apparent that some mechanism is required to fight the spammers. Then came the “rel=nofollow” attribute.

When “rel=nofollow” is added to a link, Google and other search engines ignore the link for pageranking. This means that there is no advantage in comment spam since your link is worthless.  Soon all the blogging platforms (Wordpress, Movable Type) etc. started added “rel=nofollow” to all the links in the comments automatically.

But unfortunately, this didn’t help in reducing the spam. Spammers have kept their comment bombing on. Sometimes they do get traffic via clicks on the comments.

I do agree with yesfollow that “rel=nofollow” is yet to have any impact on blog spamming. As a blog owner you need to be watchful of spam and should delete it immediately.

But there is a reason why Google wants us to use “rel=nofollow”. Note that relevance of a Web page to a keyword is determined by pagerank. So if I provide a lot of “meaningful and useful” comments on a lot of blogs, I do get a lot of inbound links. But that doesn’t guarantee that my site is relevant to the comment text or search keyword!

Hence if yesfollow becomes  widely used, the pageranking algorithm will have to be modified. Google will have to identify the blog comments and then discount them in pagerank calculation.

Yesfollow guys, pageranking is not to reward someone, but to find sites which is most relevant for a keyword!