“Are Spammers Upset about No-Follow?”
By James Nsien2
http://james-nsien2.com
Do you know of an angry and resentful “search engine spammer” who got caught with his electronic hand in the cookie jar and was punished by one of the major search engines, most likely GOOGLE (as they are the ONLY search engine with the technology to be able to detect search spamming effectively), for cheating and trying to fraudulently increase his search rankings dishonestly?
First of all, ONLY the webmaster of a website can intentionally add the “nofollow” meta tag into the websites code! No one can do it to you!
Some websites purposely create links on a web page that is for their purposes and their purposes alone, just set aside for their particular visitors and they don’t want that page to be be “spidered by the search engines and listed!”
Many of the major BLOGS and social media networks are trying to figure out reasonable ways to utilize the technology to prevent spammers from dumping a bunch of spam posts into people’s blogs in hopes of high rankings. Sadly with mixed results, but they are TRYING to do a good thing, by not allowing spammers to take over the whole internet with spam just to get high rankings.
Google is well aware of these actions and has publicly announced they are going to catch and crush cheaters, so a lot of “less than ethical web creeps are all upset and crying like babies!
No one can do it to you, though running a website from a major blog, you should inquire to see if they have a “nofollow” policy in effect for the comments that get left on your blog!
I do believe that WordPress has “nofollow” as their “default setting” for the comment section, so you may have to go into your settings and turn it off and then instead set the settings to make it so that people have to get YOUR approval and acceptance of a comment before the comment actually posts to the web and can be publicly seen online.
Here’s why nofollow was originally created:
Perhaps the page is still under construction and the site owner wants to be able to have himself and his team of designers and advisers be able to see it online, but don’t want the search engines to show up and list it to the engines, because it is NOT yet ready for public viewing and promotions.
Perhaps Bob over at BobCampingGear.com wants to show his camping buddies some pictures of some of the wondrous sites from his last camping trip. Bob can put the links to the photos up on the net for his 5,000 customers and friends around the country to see, but if he adds the “nofollow” metatag into the code, the search engines will ignore it and NOT list it publicly.
Or perhaps you either can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site. For example, some untrusted user’s comments or guestbook entries, you can use nofollow on those links of your site to avoid being associated with untrustworthy personalities that might add comments to YOUR website with “BAD or Irreputable links.
So you protect yourself by placing “nofollow” into the metatags of your comment page. This often discourages spammers from targeting your site and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing their positive PageRank into what you might call, “Bad Neighborhoods” on the web.
Those are the neighborhoods that lead nice people into devious ninja attacks from hackers, viruses, Trojan horses, spybots, endlessly aggressive pop-ups, no release screen holders and spam galore!
You don’t want to get people ticked off that you sent them into that living hell from YOUR website!
But it’s all 100%, completely intentional, no one can make you have it or do it to you.
Now recently, GOOGLE has been working on a similar concept within their own system, which affects no one outside of Google’s system. This is a policing program that detects evidence of false or fraudulent links being ranked highly through unethical, or dishonest technological gadgetry or trickery.
it is simply a way to stop cheaters from profiting from doing things against the rules and getting rewarded while the good guys like you and I have to work our butts off to get half the rankings that this BOZO is trying to steal illegally!
It is a system that is right now still being worked out, experimented with, observed and then tweaked and fine tuned again till they can find the right balance and get it right.
In general however, if you play by the rules and do things with morals, honesty, ethics and professional principals , you will not get hurt by “nofollow”, it is there only as a safeguard against web cheaters and creeps!
Make sense?
How else can I help you my friend?
James Nsien2
NCN Internet Marketing Services
http://james-nsien2.com
Originally posted 2009-03-24 19:13:32. Republished by Blog Post Promoter