Online business Toolkit
Story: Google plays tag with tricksters
The nofollow tag hurts legitimate bloggers, not the spammers.
One of the main reasons why blogs show up well in the search engines is because they are interlinked through comments and trackbacks. If use of the "nofollow" tag becomes widespread, most blogs will drop in search engine rankings.
The bigger blog spammers are using software to place links in comments or trackbacks. Since not every blogger will reinstall their blog software to add the "nofollow" tag, spamming will still work. The difference will likely be that the spammers will need to hit more blogs to get the number of active links they want.
Find out more here:
http://netinstitute.com/archives/2005/01/20/bloggers-cheer-google-as-their-search-rankings-plummet/
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