I'm going to be talking about the nofollow tag - that controversial and somewhat mis-intended tag that stops spammers from using your blog or website for SEO.

I'll start by sharing with you what a no follow tag is, and what it was developed for.

Then we will go on to see why the nofollow tag is somewhat misguided in its attempts to prevent and stop spam. Remember - HTML experts, be warned that this is not in any way an advanced analysis.

Alright - so let's say that you own a blog or website where visitors are able to contribute to content via comment forms, etc. The ultimate annoyance on sites like these occurs when you scroll down to read the user comments after an article or post - and then proceed to find message after message that is either spam or garbage.

Very annoying, to put it mildly.

Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), HTML developers introduced the nofollow link attribute.

Links with the nofollow attribute mean that any links posted in these websites' comment sections would be ignored by search engine robots, and therefore prevent free SEO through the multiple posting of useless links.

Are you with me?

Basically, the nofollow link doesn't stop people from posting spam, but it does reduce the incentive, as links posted are no longer ?counted? by search robots.

On the surface, this seems useful - and any disincentive to post garbage comments is a great idea in my mind.

However, using hindsight, we can see that the hope resting on the shoulders of the nofollow tag has turned in to somewhat of an empty promise.

Why?

Well, probably, it's because it doesn't prevent spam at all.

Let's face it - most spammers don't really care whether Google ranks their website higher in the search results, because if it did - they wouldn't be spamming, since spam is counter-productive to SEO.

About 90 percent of spam is simply targeted to the immediate reader, and hence there is absolutely no desire for any indirect effects. This is all that the nofollow tag prevents - the secondary effect. Therefore, we can already rule out 90% of trash and say that we are focusing on a very small percentage of website abusers.

Another reason it has been questioned is that it is particularly unfair on those who contribute quality content to a website. Here I'm talking mainly about sites set up with back-end programs such as WordPress or Joomla - where the nofollow attribute comes automatically turned on.

If a webmaster wasn't familiar with this, or didn't know how to turn it off - every single person who posts a genuine comment or opinion is being penalized unnecessarily.

This is surely the biggest issue with nofollow tags and why I believe they stink.

So, keep watching the HTML development community. Who knows ? there might be a better solution than a nofollow tag in the very near future.