NoFollow for Hoarding PageRank - Stupidity or Naivety?

http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/03/lessons-learned-launching-web-service.html

Posted Wednesday, March 16, 2005. Still uses redirections instead of the nofollow. Hmmm.

That Google has "publically said it wont follow these links". Matt Cutts said it at SES NYC's Indexing Summit, at least, I am 95% sure he did. Since they do not follow them, then we can assume the other answers to the bullet points. Or maybe not, it all goes back to that trust issue.

is a dreadfully naive thing to do?

i agree

Seems like a great way to tell search engines that your pages are actually filled with worthless spam content.

Nofollow is supposed to be for links that the site owner hasn't authorized, but how can a link you put there yourself not be authorized? Since we're not talking about guestbook spam or blog comments, putting nofollow on links you've put up yourself says, "check this out, I'm recommending it, but I have no confidence in it."

Kind of like warning people that you've got Turet's. Pardon my links, but I just can't control myself.

i still think it was all a big publicity stunt more than anything else. i'd rather they fix the 302 redirect problem, but they got the bloggers talking about google in a good way for weeks ;)

> Pardon my links, but I just can't control myself.

lol, that made me spill my beer

I was the one who asked the question as to how they actually treat nofollow links.

Putting a nofollow attribute on a link is "a vote of no confidence".

All the engines agreed they would recognize that nofollow meant the website owner did not wish to endorse that link.

However, they did NOT agree on how to treat a nofollow link. Google said, for now, they would not follow the link. They did not say it wouldn't be indexed as part of your page, and he was careful to say they reserved the right to change how they treat that link in the future.

Yahoo declined to say how they were treating the link, saying they had just "implemented recognition" a few days earlier and were "still experimenting".

IMO, if you have a page made up mostly of nofollow links... you obviously don't trust anything on that page. Why should they treat that page with any respect either?

Those who use the nofollow tag are saying to the engines- "hey, you know, I don't know wtf is on this page and I didn't have anything to do with it." If you ran an engine, would you rank that page well...

The funny thing is they are worried about blogspam. "Real" blogs don't get spammed. Do you think Nick would tolerate a bunch of spam link posts here? I don't think so..

They could fix the problem IMO in many many different ways. Hosted blogs that were abandoned could be turned off. Comment pages could have the option to have a robots meta. Comments could have redirect links or javascript links. There are plenty of existing methods to deal with blogspam, if the blog software owners and engines really wanted to do it. Heck, they all have recognizable "footprints", it's not like it's hard to identify blog comments.

My personal thought is that nofollow will be used for analysis of what people try to block and why. But who knows? Maybe it was just a publicity thing.

Hosted blogs that were abandoned could be turned off.

By who? Surely you are not talking about hacking your way into peoples paid servers and erase their pages, right? :) As far as I am aware it is not in the TOS of any host that you HAVE to keep your site updated - as long as you paid your bill why should the host care. And, if the host don't care and you don't care who should turn off those blog pages?

Off course Blogger.com and other services like that could turn off inactive blogs but with the focus on being biggest do you really think they will do so? It's like asking Google to remove dead pages in their index - they won't do that either. If you want to become big you better keep any trash you find on your way LOL

That says it for me. Using no follow for things other than maybe comments and trackbacks would be foolish.

What they are saying is in effect, "It's your room, but we will be able to search it at any time we like."

Hey Mikkel-

If someone's paying to host a blog, and they abandon it, that's their right, I guess. I was talking about the free ones that are hosted by the blogging companies on their own servers.

They could easily update their terms to say that blogs with no entries in x number of days will be removed.

And your point is the same as mine! If they wanted to clean up the mess, there are plenty of more effective ways to do it, other than adding a new tag attribute to the software.

Even better, add noindex,nofollow to the templates of those blogs - that way you could still link to them and not cause a wash of broken links around the web.

It does present one big problem though: Some of the content on those dead blogs could have genuine value - how do you determine that a blog is both dead *and* useless?

LOL- yes, the robots meta on the page. I had that in my post and it didn't come out. Must be cause I used greater than/less than brackets around it.

And that's a good point, there are some that are useful even though abandoned, although if you knew it was going to be removed, you might do a better job of updating it or host it on your own account.

A useful blog would probably have good incoming links- a quick scan of links to a blog could give blog software companies an idea of whether it was worth keeping.

A scan through the logfiles and incoming referrals, amount of traffic, etc. I wouldn't think it would be too hard to set some criteria.