"... a lot of SEO types were posting about nofollow again. The new twist is they’re trying all sorts of plugins and gadgets to selectively pass or bar following links from their blogs for PR.
People, this is getting really old. And really stupid. Just turn the damn thing off already."
I am going to have to agree with Tom on this. It is really stupid.
Also, the whole Wikipedia decision to add Nofollow to outbound links is stupid. And Andy Beal's campaign to Nofollow Wikipedia is stupid, even though it looks like he is Following their lead when it comes to trackbacks and comment links. Not quite calling the kettle black, but close to a very dark grey.
Carsten Cumbrowski opines:
The hope is that the return for spamming Wikipedia will be so low that it does not even make any sense for those spammers that don’t need much return to be happy.
You can live perfectly fine in India for $1 a day for example. If Spamming Wikipedia reduces that down to $0.25, the spammer will probably look for other targets. And those other targets will also go away eventually, but that is a complete different story.
Well isn't that special! Keywords here are "other targets" (eg: You, Me and Dupree). And just how will those other targets eventually go away?
And why is it a completely different story? It is the story. Wikipedia effectively kicked the spammers out of their yard and they are coming to a neighborhood near you. Is it just me, but how does this combat spam?
Its okay to follow NoFollow. Follow?
When Google first suggested Nofollow back in 2005, it didn't take long for a spec to be drafted up by Technorati. MSNSearch and Yahoo!Search jumped quickly on board supposedly, along with scores of blog software developers and proponents.
The spec abstract has nothing to do with not following a link, just applying no weight to the link itself:
By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines). Typical use cases include links created by 3rd party commenters on blogs, or links the author wishes to point to, but avoid endorsing.
When the big three of search come out and say "they will respect Nofollow", what does that mean really? After reading dozens of comments to this regard, I am under the impression that spiders can and will follow the links if they so choose ... they just will not apply any weight to the link. A link is a still a link then.
Is SPAM the cholera epedemic of the Internet?
Should we burn down an entire village of Wikipedia huts just to eradicate a plague, only to have that plague show up in somebody elses village? Where does it stop? I think with all the Doctors and Chemists at Google General, they can come up with a better cure than this.
My hat goes off to Slashdot who use heuristics, karma and other factors in combination with nofollow to combat spam. Also, to Blogoscoped for their "fading nofollow" policy. And to other like minded bloggers who are just saying NO to NoFollow.
This is the kind of responsible forward thinking that we need to be doing, not to mention doing the SE's job for them to boot. It seems to me that any SE should have the ability to differentiate between a blog post and a comment and not apply too much weight to the comment anyway. Why should we have to tell them this?
No comments:
Post a Comment