First, my feeling is that pagerank flow is the primary objective of blog spamming. I don’t think any spammer realistically thinks that actual traffic (potential customers) can realistically click through their blogspam. The reality is that it’s a lot easier to send millions and millions of emails via … you guessed it good old fashioned spam.

Secondly, I think that rel=nofollow is not likely to be anything other than a small parry in the battle against blogspam long-term. More important weapons are bayesian filtering and the creation of a cooperative spamdex. I also think the future of the user-created net has a lot more in common with reddit or digg. Think of the old-fashioned slashdot moderation system, improved. You can still post any nonsense to /. you want, but no-one will see it or read it. So big deal.

Cheers,
Paul

Personally, I think it’s only fair that someone leaving a legitimate comment gets some PR recognition for a minute or two of their time.

As for spam, we just have to deal with it as it comes. There’s no “easy” way to get rid of it.

The bots wouldn’t get past that for a while, I guess.

- while nofollow may or may not have had an effect on spam volume, it might have had a larger effect on search engine rankings. Spam sites may not spam themselves up the rankings as easily anymore, which makes their business harder. In the long run, this helps fight them. (However, I don\’t think we\’ll ever precisely know how much spam we\’d get these days without nofollow… we\’d have to know precise growth rates and assume they\’re constant.)

- do like I do with legitimate comments; after 5 days, a comment that was not removed turns to an \”approved\” one, with all initial nofollows being removed. The cool thing is that even when you\’re not able to moderate for some hours during the day (even when you\’re a full-time blogger you need sleep), spammers won\’t get a tiny weeny bit of PageRank, as long as you\’re able to remove spam within N days.

However I think Google may have fanned the flames of ignorance by calling
nofollow a spam solution … and coming from them, it’s not surprising
that many people took it that way.

In retrospect, the discussion engendered by my post has convinced me that
it’s not so much an embarrassing mistake, as it is a misguided effort by
Google to enlist webmasters’ help in solving a problem (PageRank
pollution) that they should have been able to solve on their own.

–dylan.

Before nofollow, people like Dave Winer and others blamed Google for “creating” the trackback spam problem and not helping to control it.

Sure, Google uses links. So do all the other search engines. But even without them, people would have spammed just for the link traffic below. It was never reasonable to blame the search engines for the mess caused by leaving open, unmoderated systems to accept links from anyone or anything.

So finally Google trots out nofollow, and lots of bloggers finally think, “At last!.” But the SEO community said from the beginning it wouldn’t stop trackback and comment spam.

As I summarized back then in my on nofollow:

“The new attribute won’t stop link spamming. Many people may still spam simply because they hope human beings will see the links, click through and perhaps convert. As with email spam, maybe only an incredibly tiny number will do so. But since there’s no heavy cost to the spamming, that might still be enough.”

So nofollow a failure in stopping trackback/comment spam? Sure. But anyone who understands marketing behavior never expected it to work.

A mistake from from a PR front? Nah, it’s a big success in getting the search engines off the hook, as I wrote in a follow-up shortly after nofollow launched:

“What is clear is that nofollow will NOT stop blog comment spam. Not at all. Don’t believe it? Then right now, all bloggers can stop making use of blacklists, registration schemes and other tactics used before emerged. Sit back and see if the spam goes away. It won’t. Nofollow is a nice new tool that we can use, one that as I’ve said many times before is welcomed for giving us choice and more options, but it’s not a magic bullet. Well, it’s a magic bullet for one thing. It now lets the search engines say to bloggers, we gave you want you wanted, stop blaming us for the problem!”

I agree with you whole-heartedly on this issue. REL=NOFOLLOW has already been abused by sneaky Webmasters seeking link juice in reciprocation. It just needs to go away.

The sooner the better.