Posted by Sir Four at 12:39pm May 2 '09Let me begin by giving a brief recap of search engine history. In the 90s, search engines relied mostly on "on-page factors" to determine rankings when someone searched for something. Say you search for "dog grooming." Search engines had created rankings for many pages on those keywords according to secret formulas based on where and how frequently those words appeared in various HTML tags. So they'd serve up results to you based on those rankings. If you typed "dog grooming" into a competing search engine, you'd get different results due to their different ranking formula.
Then along came Google, which had found a better way to rank sites for keywords. In addition to "on-page factors" Google introduced the concept of examining links from page to page. If your page has a lot of links pointing to it from various other sites, Google ranks your site highly.
This caused one particular problem: spammers automating the process of adding their link to various blog comments, guest books, forums, and any other place they could post to.
Solution? Google introduced an attribute that site-owners could add to the link tag: rel="nofollow". This tells Google to ignore the link. Suddenly (and for additional reasons I've not gone into) it became in a site owner's best interest to add this attribute to any link a user adds. It is done all over now, from the most humble blog to Wikipedia. And further, many site owners are adding it to trusted links--links they personally add.
In my opinion, this has gone too far. And I wonder how Google can still make effective use of its link scoring when so few links these days can be counted. And I don't like how "the little guy" has been removed from the equation. If you are a site user rather than owner, the overwhelming odds are that none of the links you post to any site are considered "valid" to Google. While the spamming certainly skewed results, ignoring all user links also skews results.
I wish Google (and other search engines who honor the attribute) would not ignore these links, but perhaps accept them with greater suspicion or consider them differently in their formula--but still consider them. We're getting to a point where nobody is officially linking to anybody anymore, and the few who do are starting to look like "suckers" for not employing the attribute.
Then along came Google, which had found a better way to rank sites for keywords. In addition to "on-page factors" Google introduced the concept of examining links from page to page. If your page has a lot of links pointing to it from various other sites, Google ranks your site highly.
This caused one particular problem: spammers automating the process of adding their link to various blog comments, guest books, forums, and any other place they could post to.
Solution? Google introduced an attribute that site-owners could add to the link tag: rel="nofollow". This tells Google to ignore the link. Suddenly (and for additional reasons I've not gone into) it became in a site owner's best interest to add this attribute to any link a user adds. It is done all over now, from the most humble blog to Wikipedia. And further, many site owners are adding it to trusted links--links they personally add.
In my opinion, this has gone too far. And I wonder how Google can still make effective use of its link scoring when so few links these days can be counted. And I don't like how "the little guy" has been removed from the equation. If you are a site user rather than owner, the overwhelming odds are that none of the links you post to any site are considered "valid" to Google. While the spamming certainly skewed results, ignoring all user links also skews results.
I wish Google (and other search engines who honor the attribute) would not ignore these links, but perhaps accept them with greater suspicion or consider them differently in their formula--but still consider them. We're getting to a point where nobody is officially linking to anybody anymore, and the few who do are starting to look like "suckers" for not employing the attribute.
rel="nofollow", scourge of the web - Sir Four