Poll: Should We Sunset The Nofollow Link Attribute

The nofollow link attribute was originally designed to reduce comment and forum spam by removing the value of links with the nofollow attribute. Originally the major blog platforms adopted them immediately to reduce comment spam. Did it work on reducing comment spam?

A WebmasterWorld thread has some webmasters arguing it hasn't. It is hard to tell. Would comment spam be ten fold without the nofollow in place? Again, hard to say.

One webmaster wrote:

I just checked my wordpress account and it had 1000's of comment spam all using rel="nofollow" in the link text. This hasn't deterred spammers one bit at all. In fact in many ways its made it worse, to the user they can't actually tell which links from a site are untrusted and for a webmaster its almost impossible to get a genuine dofollow link from anywhere.

I think its time this code was retired....

But as the WebmasterWorld moderator replied, it likely would be worse without it.

Do you think so? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This post was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today. Have a happy, healthy and sweet new year!