How About an Alternative to NoFollow? Just a thought...

It seems more people are trumpetting the upsides of the nofollow attribute rather than those who slam it as a nuissance. And to mirror some blogs from fellow members of the search engine marketing field, I'm on the side of the latter. Not because I'm an SEO who doesn't want to see a method of linking rendered useless, but because I think legitimate web users are being punished by black hat SEO methods.

Moreover, will increased use of the "rel=nofollow" tag really result in less spam? Seeing as how spam, by its nature, comes from people who don't pay attention to the actual website they're spamming (or at the very worst comes from automated scripts), I highly doubt the spammers will be cautious enough not to waste their time on websites that use NoFollow.

And as some have already pointed out, wouldn't it be easier for sites to improve their spam filters? Many blog owners have comments set to post automatically. By spending just a couple minutes a day, they could filter spam without having to use the nofollow tag. But instead, they've decided to penalize legitimate readers of their column. Comments aren't always about coy plugs for your own website; they can provide useful follow-up information for other readers and also add to the amount, and relevancy, of the site's or blog's content, which is something that will benefit the site in the long run.

But enough about blog commenting. The NoFollow attribute can be a dangerous tool in the wrong hands. Webmasters who use it with reckless abandon could find themselves weakening the popularity of their directories, forums, or bulletin boards. It seems there is a widespread fallacy that linking out to too many websites will make your PageRank bleed and your rankings fall, and the nofollow hullaballoo will no doubt give more fuel to that fire. Linking is essentially the basis of the Internet - an interlinked network of websites. Yahoo has millions of outbound links, yet they seem to keep a PageRank of 9 without much problem. Hmm..

All that being said, the reality is that spam on the Internet today is at an all-time high. Something must be done to stop it, right? Then why not bring more of a community-oriented approach to the Internet today and set up a spam watchdog group? This group could coordinate efforts with search engines and other watchers of spam, build banned IP lists, gather fake email addresses and penalize web sites that frequently get reported by concerned search engine users, webmasters and blog owners. Blogging services, Wikipedia, popular discussion forums, social bookmarking sites and more, could all connect with a central database of this information to help them combat spam on their pages. I may be getting over my head with this idea, but in theory I believe this idea could really serve as a very useful policing service for years to come. Funding could come from the web sites that are most affected by spam (ie. the major search engines), and possibly advertisers.

But if the real sign of the introduction of the NoFollow attribute is a step towards an overall decrease in the weight links carry for search engine rankings, then I suppose this discussion is all for naught.