No Follow Does No Favors
One method websmasters use to fight spam is the no follow attribute on links. Basically what this does is tell search engines not to follow that link essentially killing all search engine crawling and indexing of that site.
This makes your site less attractive to spammers.
The problem is, it doesn’t work. Spammers still spam sites who use no follow. Most of the time spam bots don’t even seem to notice if the site uses no follow or not. If you’re using a system like wordpress, akismet works really well. And other blog systems have other spam options that help a lot.
So if it doesn’t stop spam, what’s the point? That’s a good question. The only outcome I can see is that you’re hurting the people who visit your site and make legitimate comments. You’re denying people who participate on your site from receiving any kind of kick back or better search engine ranking.
Something to note: if you use wordpress and want to disable the no follow feature, there’s a plugin called DoFollow that does an excellent job.
For the record: the catanetwork and Pixelware Design are removing nofollow attributes from our sites. If you take the time to post a good comment, you should be rewarded, not punished. So comment at will!