have a bandit day

You’ve got mail!
[Generic name] is now following you on Twitter!
“Lovely! Let’s click on the user profile.”
Wait, following 17,000 people?…and they don’t even have a profile…

You might want to have a seat. You’ve been spammed.

Spammers’ goal is to get their grubby little hands on a handful of links so they can gain rank with search engines (a solid plan, sure, but one that fills our lives with digital pollution). Take heart; social media sites have a nifty kill switch rendering these links impotent*: the “nofollow” attribute.

*Using nofollow on a link leaves a functioning link, but offers no linkjuice.

Say, Cap'n, can you take care of spam while you're at it?

I posed this question to the LinkedIn Blogging and Search Marketing community: “Do links from LinkedIn currently use the “nofollow” attribute? For social sites that do use the “nofollow” attribute (such as Flickr), is it worth keeping spammers out at the cost of sacrificing a back link?”

Chris Gauron, Independent Consultant Specializing in SEO, SEM, PPC & Social Media, answered,

“If it were my site I would use nofollow. More links in and less links out. It is better to spend some time getting 1 really good link than 1000 bad ones.

It is important to have complete control of your link equity if you are trying to become the next social media site. The only people who care about a nofollow are people like us. Most people (even in advertising) have no idea what a nofollow is.”

Alan Bleiweiss, Senior SEO and Internet Marketing Consultant of “Hey Dude, Where’s My Site?”, added,

“With a site like LinkedIn, it’s pretty difficult to spam LinkedIn for back link purposes just due to the nature of what’s involved with getting links onto LinkedIn pages. With other sites though, not so much. Better to focus more energy on high quality site optimization and cherry-picking quality links.”

You heard it from the experts: nofollow is for our own good.Thanks to Chris and Alan for your answers, and LinkedIn Q&A because it’s FRACKIN’ awesome.

- bang.