This is not a guide or tutorial, but I need to get this off my chest. I really dislike the rel=”nofollow” attribute especially on blogs, forums, wikis and other sites with user contributed content. I acknowledge that there is a need for the attribute is a few special cases, but for most of the time there is no need.

Avoid having certain pages indexed

Some webmasters try to avoid having certain pages indexed by the search engines, some blogs and forums do the same with profile pages and similar non content pages. It is understandable but the best way to accomplish this is not by using the rel=”nofollow” attribute but by using the robots.txt file, if it’s too hard to write a robots.txt file (it really isn’t) then it is also possible to use the robots meta tag. And it is getting even better, even those search engine spiders that doesn’t support the rel=”nofollow” attribute respect the robots.txt file.

To fight spam

There are better ways to fight spam than to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. The first thing you need to do is to stop the spam bots and for most blog CMS’s there are excellent plugins that stops 99.9% of all spam bots. In a Wordpress Akismet will do this for you, and to increase security you could add a captcha, to further increase security to could require the users to register and login.  After dealing with the bots you only got the human spammers which manually visit blogs, type in a comment and drop a link to a web site, but if you have a site you probably already monitor and moderate the user contributed content. If you don’t moderate this content then you better stop accepting it, hostile users can do a lot worse than to drop a link.  I am fine with using the rel=”nofollow” on non-moderated content, but once the content is checked then links should either be removed or be left in place. For Wordpress there is an excellent plugin called DoFollow, it removes the rel=”nofollow” after a certain number of days. On most blogs that I write I have set it to 7 days, which usually are more than enough. But won’t people just link out to all kind of irrelevant sites? A few clear and visible link guidelines should be enough to deal with the problem, but normally this won’t be a problem for most sites.