More nofollow thoughts

An extension of my post from this morning. As I read various objections to the nofollow tag, aside from the “It won’t actually instantly end all comment spamming” (which nobody has claimed it would), the biggest cavil is, “It hurts commenters.”

This infliction of harm seems to be of two types.

1. It treats all commenters as criminals.

   I suppose that’s true, although another way of looking at it is that it distinguishes between the original poster/site owner and others visiting (whether dear, bosom friends or evil spammers). I suspect that there will be some way of whitelisting or allowing registered users to comment without having nofollow in their links, but …

   But, even if so, so what? When we put moderation onto comments, we do the same tarring with a broad brush. When we put registration onto them, ditto. When we make folks type in Captchas and other such hoops, likewise. When we keep our MT password a secret, so that folks can only post comments, not actual blog entries, we’re treating others as untrusted.

   Deal with it.

2. It robs commenters of something of value.

   The idea here is that people who make comments should get some sort of distinct reward, and the coin of the realm in this case is PageRank for their link targets.

   This is wrong, or beside the point, in so many ways.

   First off, if folks are commenting for PR, then screw ’em. Or, rather, I really don’t care whether they get that PR or not, so it’s not something I’m going to worry about.

   If they are conmenting to make a contribution to the discussion, then nothing has been lost by anyone. They’ve made their contribution, their content (and name and URL) are indexed, even if not PRed or spidered, and on display in front of God and everyone. All’s right with the world.

   I mean, already in MT (and this was widely applauded when it happens), the “Comment Author URL” field is redirected to keep spammers from using that field (and thus keep PR from accruing). If that’s not an evil thing, why is the nofollow tag (which effectively does the same thing) so bad?

   I may have a warped view of this, in that probably three quarters of my commenters don’t actually have a web site, and only a tiny fraction of my commenters include links. And of those links, only a small fraction as well are links back to their own pages. So this isn’t something that’s going to “hurt” my commenters.

   Trackback is slightly different, perhaps. Folks who trackback to articles here are, in theory, being similarly hurt because they didn’t get any PR for doing so. But, again, it’s hard to say that’s a distinct harm, unless that was your point in tracking back. The link is still there. I’m still likely to go out and look at the post in question. The poster has gotten something of value — my writing to refer to or be inspired by (hence the trackback). That their page should somehow be enrichened by their pointing to me seems a bit goofy.

   I’ll confess that I’ve a hankering for PageRank for myself. When I see that my front page is PR:5, I go, “Ooooooh, nifty.” I feel the same way about hit counts, or my rank in the TLB Ecosystem. But that’s such an indirect and passionless bit of whuffie that it’s insignificant next to folks actually caring to comment here, or trackback to my posts, or things like that. Those sorts of strokes aren’t dependent on PageRank, and so neither is my ego. Really.

   In other words, any “penalizing” I accrue by my comments on other pages not getting PageRank for my own blog is so trivial to my mind as to be non-existent. I find it hard, then, to empathize with the position that others find it intolerable.

Of course, none of this is either automatic nor unavoidable. If you’ve licked the comment spam problem on your site, implementing nofollow doesn’t really do anything for you, and thus can be avoided. But if stuff still gets through now and then, or you have a life beyond slapping down spammers as they hit, then I think it’s a fine long-term investment.

UPDATE: Anil Dash discusses how design decisions can have implications that could never be imagined — taking, as an example PageRank.

PageRank, when created, didn’t assume that content on a web page, especially links, would be generated by someone other than the publisher of that page. PageRank was not based on the assumption that the rankings would have monetary value. And PageRank is based on the assumption that site editors choose their content, particularly their links, based primarily on merit.

Because those assumptions no longer pertain in a blogging/wiki world, we end up with effects that were not predicted. How this applies to nofollow is discussed in further detail. A good read.