rel=”nofollow” Is Coming!

In an effort to fight COMMENT SPAM, Google, Yahoo and MSN will be adhering to the new href attribute know as:

rel=”nofollow”

Here is its use:
Visit My Page

Why is this significant? Because it means anytime a rel=”nofollow is added to an href statement, it means the GoogleBot will NOT follow the link, thereby reducing the reward to the original owner of the link.

We’re strongly considering using this new attribute…

not only for the EzineArticles BLOG, but for the BODY of the articles within our site.

We will not use this technology for the RESOURCE BOX (as that is considered payment to the author for sending us their content), but we are strongly considering adding the rel=”nofollow” tag to ALL URLs within the BODY of any article.

Why would we want to do that?

To discourage authors from linking too many URLs in the body of their article for the sole purpose of personal pagerank gain.

What are your thoughts on the nofollow rel tag?

Posted by on January 27, 2005 at 11:26 am | 4,470 views

5 Comments »


1
Kristin Johnson writes:

We all want to increase our PR I think. Article promotion is preferable to FFA link pages. Unfortunately, because people abuse legitimate means of promotion, we have to police ourselves even though the spammers don’t. I would appreciate it if in return for our self-restraint they would stop sending me viagra/cialis/home loan/free cable descrambler/fix credit/porno/Nigerian lottery e-mails, but that’s not the way the world works.

Comment provided January 27, 2005 at 12:11 PM

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2
Caroline writes:

That sounds like a reasonable action to me.

Comment provided January 27, 2005 at 4:54 PM

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3
Christopher M. Knight writes:

An update:

It’s 2011 now. 6 years have passed.

Back in 2010, we added the NOFOLLOW attribute to links in the article body but not the resource box.

We continue to let links in the resource box be DOFOLLOW.

We haven’t considered a DOFOLLOW link being payment to our authors for many years now even though it was true back in 2005 when the site was in re-launch mode.

We do consider high-value traffic sent to our members websites to be the primary payment we give our members in exchange for their content… and we send traffic at a rate of millions of total clicks per month for free.

Will there be a day when NOFOLLOW gets added to the links in the resource box? I have no idea. For today, those links are DOFOLLOW.

I hope they can remain that way. Time and market pressures may change our position.

Comment provided February 27, 2011 at 2:17 PM

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Dan writes:

Google won’t respect your content farm more for adding “no follow” to the links.

The cheap, crappy content is the issue, not the resource box links giving PR.

February 27, 2011 at 3:07 PM

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4
Jacquelyn Dunn writes:

I am very pleased that EzineArticles continues to keep EzineArticles a quality place to submit our articles. If we all write quality articles it will benefit us all.

Comment provided March 4, 2011 at 10:55 AM

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