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I found the following code in a question today and flagged it as possible spam.

So far as I'm aware there is no such microformat as dofollow, but it would appear to be a deliberate attempt to SPAM. Is there a policy on this, is it common and should we edit it out flag, delete or down vote the question?

//update 30/01/2012

My main concern is cracking down on this type of behavior. dofollow'ing a link does nothing (all links logically would be dofollow unless nofollow is specified and dofollow isn't even valid code), but is an obvious and deliberate attempt at hacking the site for SEO purposes and something that should be viewed dimly, hence the question about procedure. 

i am currently running a site **<a rel="dofollow" href="http://www.newsworldinside.com/" target="_blank">`News World Inside`</a>.** I am afraid for some of my friends may creates invalid clicks on my site's adsense account to ban my site. Con anyone help me how can i get rid off from this?

Link to Question

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  • Fortunately, all our links are nofollow for this reason, with some exceptions. The site automagically strips anything that isn't href="..." from the code.
    – Aarthi Staff
    Commented Jan 31, 2012 at 16:53

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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When you see something like this, and the question is good and you have enough rep, edit the question and remove the spam. That way the community can still benefit from it. If the question is otherwise low quality or you don't have enough rep, flag it for moderator review so we can deal with it.

In this case I removed all mentions of their site as they are completely unecessary.

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Nice catch, though it's not a huge concern - check source on the rendered page:

<a href="http://www.newsworldinside.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.newsworldinside.com/</a>

A downvote (along with the comment you left) should be sufficient to discourage further spamming attempts.

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  • I did see the no-follow, my main concern was that this sort of thing doesn't become a problem over time.
    – toomanyairmiles
    Commented Jan 29, 2012 at 19:37
  • ...also there's no such thing as rel-dofollow anyway, so whatever. The term "dofollow" is used by some to refer to sites that don't implement nofollow, but there's no recognized value that explicitly advises engines to follow/index/rank links, as that's the default behavior anyway.
    – Su'
    Commented Jan 30, 2012 at 9:53
  • @Su' I did mention that it wasn't valid in the question, of course it does nothing, worse it's a logical fail - all links are dofollow unless otherwise specified. My main concern was the obvious attempt at spam/hack.
    – toomanyairmiles
    Commented Jan 30, 2012 at 11:26
  • Oh, wow. I somehow managed to black out that entire bit in the sentence. Ignore.
    – Su'
    Commented Jan 30, 2012 at 17:00

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