It’s the Implementation, Stupid
(Sidenote: I originally was going to title this entry “Nofollow: destroyer of the Intraweb…?” but decided the new title was more fitting.)
I’ve been (somewhat) on the fence about the whole rel=”nofollow” thing, as not-so-recently announced by Google and a couple friends. Here’s a draft spec, for the uninitiated. But a lot of people who are gung-ho about nofollow being the single worst thing to ever happen to the Internet need to reevaluate some of their views. Perhaps their conclusion (nofollow is more harm than good) isn’t necessarily inaccurate, but their assumptions most certainly are.
It’d seem to me that in order to declare using rel=”nofollow” on links that can’t be trusted officially “bad,” it would have to be proven that nofollow would actually worsen the current situation with comment and trackback spam. And few people have seemed to be able to make that argument. Most who say it’s a bad thing say so because it breaks the Internet, destroys the “web” of links within the blogosphere, or simply wouldn’t stop the efforts of spammers in the first place. And of course, there are those who swear that this is just another ploy by Google to get it closer to world-domination. I have my doubts about at least that last point, but the problem with these arguments is either that they’re untrue or don’t make nofollow “bad.” Ineffective, perhaps. Not “bad.”