Wikipedia is making an understandable, but lamentable decision to add the no-follow link attribute to all of their outbound links. It’s a directive telling Google and the other search engine operators not to follow a particular link because it should not be considered authoritative. You can read more about it on Google’s site, titled: Preventing comment spam.
Since Google launched the no-follow initiative, every major blog software application has adopted the inclusion of no-follow links in their comments, etc. with no discernible effect. The graph below only represents a slice of the comment spam activity happening online, but even on that basis, there have been days where the number of comment spams caught is in excess of 6 million.
So, the question remains: if no-follow is such an abysmal failure why is it still being pushed? Truthfully, it remains because it does solve a problem, however it’s not the problem of Wikipedia and of any individual blogger that is being solved, but that of Google’s. Google suddenly doesn’t have to deal with a whole class of websites and can maintain a much cleaner index of sites. While this is great (and I appreciate it the many times a day that I use Google), it doesn’t change the fact that sites are still swimming in comment spam.
This is an unfortunate mix of:
- Spammers wanting actual eyeballs visiting their sites to look at for-pay porn and poker sites
- Spammers not having to be efficient in their distribution techniques because as it’s so cheap on a mass scale
Further, there is a real negative effect to the implementation of no-follow: Blogs are among the richest discussion points on the Internet and impeding that discussion from making it into the the Internet’s search mechanisms degrades the collective intelligence of the Internet. So now this has moved to Wikipedia, where no-follow will cut from sight many accurate, informative links making the situation worse.
So what should the valiant Wikipedians do? My recommendation would be to start running page edits through Akismet, the one definite blow I’ve seen hit the comment spam scum suckers. They’d be using the collective spam fighting intelligence of the greater Internet community (which is something that strikes me as very much in keeping with the spirit of Wikipedia) and they wouldn’t have to make us all a little less connected to do it.
WHAT TO DO NOW?