Nofollow, No sh!t

Ramsweb said:

I agree with the OP here. I once had a single no follow link that gave me a huge jump in rankings. The whole do follow link is over exaggerated. Look at it this way, Google rewards your site for natural looking back links.

Does it expect the average Internet user to check for no follow tags and do follow tags when they leave a link to a page. It doesn't make sense. They probably came out with terms like that to discourage widespread spamming of pages just because they were do follow.

Click to expand...

How can you be certain that the nofollow link was the cause of your jump in rank? I will answer that for you - you cannot be certain.

I am not saying that you are definitely wrong here, it's just that I think the problem should be viewed from a different perspective. Google is a million miles away from being AI complete. The problem of linkspam detection is NP hard. This means it cannot be solved with the computing resources available in the current state of technology.

In short - I believe that Google needs to use the nofollow tag to maintain the integrity of its results. If it didn't use the nofollow tag to its full effect, then the noise from wordpress comments and social networking sites would degrade the quality of its results.

I appreciate that lots of nofollow links are genuine, but this is the core of my argument about nofollow:

The negative effects of not using the nofollow tag to its full effect (i.e. letting more spam through) outweigh the positive potential effects of listening to more social signals from the Social Networking world. Google is better off if it uses nofollow to disqualify links it cannot trust.

Google cannot distinguish very well between spammy and non-spammy social networking links.

Like the pic Gemini