rel=nofollow part two
The Last Craft? Marcus’ blog on Agile Web Development » How did Google get it wrong?
I posted this as a comment, but am adding it here, for my own reference.
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Any scheme that allows the owners of the website to give information to google opens google up for abuse. Which is the one reason I am opposed to the rel=nofollow scheme.
The “blog effect” took google by surprise and skewed PR in a way that those who designed it hadn’t anticipated. I think this scheme is a veiled attempt to lessen the effect that all the linking within blogs has on PR system. If all blogs used rel=nofollow for trackbacks and comments links, then blogs in general would have far less PR, which would filter back through the internet giving non-blogs a better chance of being noticed.
To solve the spam problem, I would propose a penalty for sites that gain more than a certain number of backlinks within an alotted time period. This will obviously effect other non-spamming sites, but I think it would be safe to say that just because 10,000 bloggers link to the funny-page-of-the-day, doesn’t make that page any more important in the bigger scope of things.
Of course that is also abusable, as I can very quickly put an end to a competitors legitimate link building campaign by spamming using his URL. Which puts us back at square one.
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I found this article when searching for nofollow penalties and found your counter suggestion interesting. I think any geeneric rule about backlinks just wouldn’t work either to be honest.
I’m not sure what the right answer is (I started adding nofollow into my news links to smaller sites, but decided that Page Rank hoarding isn’t worth the potential negative feedback) and I think a third, better solution is still out there I think.
ggggggggggggggg
de, – Sunday, February 22, 2004 at 11:47:29 (PST)
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