Should Twitter Reverse NoFollow?
Writing by Social Marketing Journal on Saturday, September 6, 2008 Leave a comment
Twitter’ recent decision to add the ‘nofollow’ tag to bio’s has met with a lot of discussion. Most of it has centered around Matt Cutts role in the whole affair. Perhaps a full disclosure from Twitter on why they made the change could help clear the air.
The decision itself has two sides. Matt Cutts in his response to the criticism of his involvement does make at least one valid point, that of spamming. It has become the curse of the 21st century and the only real way to defeat it is to remove the incentive. If people feel they can get valuable link juice from sites such as Twitter, they will milk them for all they are worth. Remove the link juice, and the incentive is gone.
Blogs that add the dofollow tag to their comments notice a jump in the number of spam comments fairly quickly. Add the nofollow tag and that spam drops off. It is a catch 22 for most individuals and effects the blog as much as it does the commentor.
Should Twitter reverse their nofollow tags on the bio’s. From one perspective, the answer could be no. Why encourage spam. If a decent spam filtering system could be incorporated, or perhaps removing the ability to link in that section of bio and including a dedicated link section, with a limit of two or three links, then this may prove to be a good meet-in-middle option.
Whether or not Matt Cutts played a big role in the decision is not really relevant. In fact, Matt states in his reply:
By the way, I totally support if Evan (Twitter co-founder) wanted to lift nofollow for real users in some way,…..
Perhaps with a bit of time and space, sensible heads will rule. Twitter will find a way to filter spam and remove the contentious nofollow tag. For now I can accept their decision, if it is truly is spam based, as I want to see spam reduced as much as possible and if Twitter works to find alternatives.
Leave a comment Category: Social Blogging
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