Shocking rel nofollow abuse by major players

nofollow is sort of like reverse cloaking: it presents different
content to the search engine than to the average user:

To the average user it looks like a link, yet to the search engine it looks like
it's not a link.

This is indeed a reverse cloaking - a reverse because it's initiated not by
a user with the purpose to trick, scam, screw! the search engine, but it was invented
by a search engine with a purpose to screw the user.

What do you think? Do you think I'm right?

Anyway, the nofollow originally was made popular by google, so other search
engines agreed that it was a good idea and decided to follow suit.


nofollow abuse:
digg
twitter
stubledupon

but also: (just a random example) http://stackoverflow.com/users/191837/kevin-peno
On personal pages of registered user!

How lame is that! If admin suspects that a user is a spammer, he should
just remove the user.

Also, stackoverflow has such thing as ;reputation;
so they at the very least should remove nofollow from
members with decent reputation!

I like the stackoverflow but I wold not give them
my time of day and contribute anything to them
if all I get in return is a lame 'nofollow' link
back to me.


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Also on github.com

How lame is that - accounts on github are basically
open source software projects. If I contribute an open
source project, then the least you can do is give me a fully
normal link, not a nofollow shit.

you want me as another user of github, you want me
to link to you, yet you treat me like a spammer?
No, thank you. You can keep your github to yourself
and I will just setup my own site to host my own project.

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At least DIGG has some in-house algorythm that would remove nofollow links
once they establish a repuration for your resource, but it's not clear
how this works. Once thing is clear that if your have many diffs (like 100+)
then the nofollow is gone. What is not clear is what they take into account
They should take into account the user who submitted the diggs - an old
user who has not been flagged as spammer and submitted certain number of diggs should
be able to submit dofollow links.

By the way, do you know why they call it dofollow? You know, there is no such thing as
dofollow attribute,.... it's just because the other way to describe links without a nofollow tag
is to call them nonofollow link. And that sounds pretty stupid.

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The right way to use nofollow is ONLY in comment or user submitted content like
a forum. Even then, a system should be in place that would allow good members to
post good links. Period! Don't slap a cookie-cutter nofollow attribute on all
links!

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Who else got it wrong? Probably the blogger. They are right to add nofollow to links
in comments, but they probably should not be slapping the nofollow to links
to other members who commented. I mean if it's a spam fighting technique, then
Blogger should be able to develop the best anti comment spam in the world, after all
they have access to real-time blog comments from millions of users.

If a user is a spammer, then blogger can just remove the whole user's account, making
all the hard work the user made in adding comments totally useless.

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Who's got it right? youtube! Then don't slap nofollow to links to user accounts from comments,
to links to friends and subscribers.

They even allow 1 normal link to your external website from youtube account page. More than one
link is OK, you can just add it by the way of editing the HTML of your channel description
but all such links are indeed nofollow links.

Who else got it right? livejournal does not add nofollow links to members from the comment pages
but it also does not add nofollow to any links in comments. This creates comment spam problem on
livejournal which they fight by letting user to require captcha on their comment pages.

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Who else is abusing it? Some forum software like vbulletin usually adds nofollow
to all incoming posts and there is no way to use any intelligent algorythm to
no add nofollow from trusted members.

also they seem to add a nofollow link even to links from personal profile pages
and many webmasters don't even allow viewing a profile page for not logged in user.

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Once forum sofware that is pretty good with not abusing nofollow is simplemachines forum
The link from profile page is a normal link and is usually seen by not logged in user