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Diaryland is da bomb I just *have* to tell you how much this all sucks. Who're these other people he's writing about? Who's the freak writing this, anyway? What's gone before. What's going on right now? Where do *you* visit on the web? What're you building right now?


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Another smart-assed remark from Mike
rel="nofollow" considered harmful(?)
08:30:00 on 2005-01-19

Google, MSN Search and Yahoo! have implemented support for a rel attribute on link tags in HTML that will cause them to not include that link for calculation of page rank for search engine order. Basically, in a link tag, place rel="nofollow" and the search engines won't include that link for PageRank calculations.

At first glance, this is going to suck. It's the tragedy of the commons where the actions of a few (spammers) pissing in the pool ruins it for everyone else.

"Why should I care?" you may ask. Well, the trick comes down to this — it's a play to stop comment spam. Basically, comment spammers write scripts to leave comments with links on blog comments, wikis, forums and so forth, because more links means that the sites they link to come up higher in the search engine rankings. Thus, you see weblogs with links for buying various forms of male penile enhancement and wikis trying to sell you knockoff products.

This gives website developers the way to cut their losses by removing incentive for the spammers. With these new attributes included in a link, then their PageRank is unaffected by the links they may be able to leave. To that end, it's not nearly as useful for them to leave the links, and thus, the hope is, the spam is abated.

There's a problem, though: what about legitimate links that you may leave? Things like trackbacks (which also get spammed), your link to your website you leave on comments on others' blogs, the link at the bottom of your forum posts and that sort of thing? Odds are, those will be caught up in the anti-spam settings.

This is going to hurt small bloggers, for sure. You do quite a bit of posting and linking legitimately to build your PageRank and build your membership. This is going to whisk a lot of that away.


What is the small blogger to do? Search engines are a significant source of traffic. It's not something you can leave alone.

This is the crux — links that people put your link on their own sites won't have the rel="nofollow" attribute on the link. You need to get as many of these as possible.

Commenting will still be valuable; places where you are a regular and comment a lot will attract attention of the site owners, and hopefully they will like your site and place a link. Forums probably won't be valuable, because once they implement this (trivial) change, then all links off their site will be worth zero other than somebody clicking on it and visiting your site. Ditto for wiki sites.

The issue with comments, though, is that you have to focus your attention. Look at the PageRank of sites that you visit a lot, and comment more on those that have higher PageRank. Make your comments count, make them on-topic and build a relationship with the site owner as a regular visitor. If all goes well, you'll get a prominent link to your site.

There will certainly be other tricks to boost PageRank in time, but for a while there will be an effect on small site owners. Let's hope that alternatives are found quickly!

restlessmind


Ancient history:
2013-03-01"You'll be stone dead in a moment!"
2007-08-07I covet fuck you money
2007-07-16My own long, dark tea-time of the soul
2007-07-11My internet experience is lacking
2007-07-10Coincidence



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