Many people in the SEO field are asking the same question: is a company as powerful and sophisticated as Google really unable to control the inappropriate use of DoFollow and hidden links? Or is it just not high enough on their agenda? Certainly, for those of us in the web design business, it should be. How many times have we worked hard, producing a genuinely great website for a worthwhile and well-respected company, only to have it beaten out, even if only by one ranking, by some non-existent or fly-by-night site who put their entire budget into basically false DoFollow comment links, and is encrusted with hidden links and false search terms?

                For those of you unfamiliar or not entirely clear on the subject, a DoFollow link is any link, usually in a blog, that is NOT making use of the NoFollow feature. The NoFollow feature, which is now common in most legitimate blog posts, is a piece of HTML code that tells webcrawlers to ignore that particular link on their mapping of the internet. A webcrawler, or webspider, is simply a program used by search sites like Google to gain the data they use to map out and organize internet sites for search rankings. These programs constantly move through the web, noting what is connected to what, which sites are connected to which, and what the relevant search terms are for these sites. But why wouldn’t you want the search site to explore every possible link? In fact, the NoFollow feature was created to stop spammers from simply inserting their unwanted links endlessly into the comment area of blog posts. So, again, DoFollow is simply neglecting to properly use this important feature.

                One theory is that Google’s desire to maintain the immediacy of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), makes it very difficult for them to defend against unscrupulous use of DoFollow links, or hidden and invisible links (visible to the webcrawlers, but not to us), because of the short time between a link being detected and it being used algorithmically to affect a page’s ranking level. This is similar to the time delay experienced when reporting spam, which often have to be reviewed by real people.

                Regardless, most of the ethical companies – and Webmaster Studio proudly counts itself among them – do believe more could be done at Google and other search engines to prevent this kind of abuse. We’re just waiting to see what they’ll do.