Is nofollow breaking search?

January 18th, 2007

With the addition many of the biggest social networking sites, including more recently YouTube to the “nofollow club”, is nofollow creating a situation where link building will eventually become impossible?

Nofollow was designed by Google to stop people spamming blogs, forums, guestbooks etc by essentially making the posted links useless in search engine ranking. Google’s rel=”nofollow” tag is added to hyperlinks to stop them being counted as a “vote” for your site. Google disregards any links that have the nofollow tag, and these links are not included in its ranking decisions.

Most of us that own a blog have encountered comment spam and so the nofollow tag is an essential tool to counter these spammers. There is however a more worrying aspect of nofollow that is starting to be seen, especially in the social networking arena. Huge websites like Digg.com, del.icio.us, and some major forums are nofollowing all their outbound links. YouTube have recently joined the club and are also nofollowing their outbounds. While this helps prevent spamming it is also making the nofollow tag a far more common thing to see on peoples websites. After all if one of Google’s own sites is doing it why shouldnt you nofollow all your outbound links on your website? While SEO savvy webmasters know that nofollow should mainly be used to combat spamming, some website owners are adding nofollow tags to all of their outbounds, even in reciprocal linking to try and hoard Page Rank, with no regard to their linking partners.

With the addition of more and more authoritative sites to the “nofollow club”, it will become an ever increasingly accepted practice to nofollow all outbound links. Webmasters will find it even more difficult to build links to their sites and rely on those links for any period of time. Additionally with sites like YouTube nofollowing, are authors who provide quality content to their site being penalised by not receiving any link credit for that content? Will they bother to add quality content any more if the incentive has gone?