Translations:Manual:Nofollow/4/en

The main benefit cited for using nofollow is that it deters spam. Mainly this benefit applies to pages where spam could be overlooked and therefore not be reverted. Nofollow mostly deters spammers who are sophisticated enough to know about nofollow but either not sophisticated enough to realize they can still get a return on their investment even with nofollow in place or aiming for higher returns on investment. Nofollow unfortunately does not deter spammers if their motivation is to attract visitors to product pages rather than to boost pagerank, if your wiki is very popular. Another cited benefit of nofollow is that driving pagerank to linked sites can be harmful to those sites or to the article subject; this, however, does not specify whether said harm is beneficial or harmful to the reader, who may find even (or especially) derogatory information useful, e.g. if it helps him avoid a shoddy product.