Ponders concerning rel="nofollow"

Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote:

__/ [ tonnie ] on Saturday 09 September 2006 20:32 \__

Big Bill schreef:
On 9 Sep 2006 11:55:50 -0700, "KimmoA" <kimmoa (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

What search engines, other than Google, support it?


Google has become a search engines monolith and monopolist, which
extends towards a becoming part of the American (and global)
oligopoly. Just like XML sitemaps, this was 'invented' by Google
(unilaterally) and supported by Google. I think the W3 consortium
should have gotten involved.


Also, will implementing it on my own sites benefit me in any way? I
find it to be evil, but if it gives more weight to the non-crippled
URLs, I guess it's good.


It introduces links hierarchy and classes, which is unwanted
complexity, IMH.

http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archiv...-rel-nofollow/

Also of relevance:

http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archiv.../comment-spam/


Why would you want to be linking to sites if you don't want the
engines or people to follow them? You can gain authority by linking
to quality sites in your genre.


Valid point.


The only propper way to use it is when the website linking to is
merely used as an example but not trusted enough or a plain spammer.


Aye. But I think that more CMS's should have an expiration rule that
strips off the rel"nofollow" after some predefined period of time.
Still, rel="nofollow" is no answer to curious human surfers. That's
where additional issues lie and it is also the reason why comment spam
is on the rise, despite the emergence of sophisticated anti-spam
mechanism -- those that make commenting and reviewing an utterly
miserable and repellent experience.

I can recall the day when rel="nofollow" was introduced. Some overly
optimistic developers thought it was the death knell to SPAM while I
took a stance.

http://schestowitz.com/IMG/no-nofollow-button.png

rel="nofollow" never offered a solution. It was a bad idea from the
get-go. It killed participation in Web sites (no link, no incentive),
made everything more complex, and urges spammers to use greater brute
force.

http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archiv...ogs-recession/

In a sense, Google killed participation in blogs (not deliberately). I
predicted this in the item above (when rel="nofollow" was a new
feature) and even Om Malik linked to that item to express consent.

http://gigaom.com/2005/04/25/busines...-and-business/

Thanks Roy, will read it later (bookmarked it now). I have plans for
ages to write down my pov, and when I do, I will link to your article as
well :-)

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Paul <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote:

On 10 Sep 2006 20:06:58 GMT, John Bokma <john (AT) castleamber (DOT) com> wrote:

Paul <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote:

[..]

LOL, with CPanel one can install a blog and a wiki AFAIK with 2 mouse
clicks and entering some values. So we're already getting close.

I'm not on a Linux server

Oh, don't worry, I run WikiMedia, WordPress, and even phpBB on XP :-D.

Aye. I saw bluefrog being ddosed of the net. And that was IIRC just one
angry spammer.

Who, no doubt has the FBI etc onto him

I have no idea if the FBI can do anything in Russia :-) Moreover, if the
FBI had that much power, why do I still get every day that shit? The USA
is in the top 3 of spam sending countries IIRC.

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On 10 Sep 2006 22:47:09 GMT, John Bokma <john (AT) castleamber (DOT) com> wrote:

Paul <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote:

On 10 Sep 2006 20:06:58 GMT, John Bokma <john (AT) castleamber (DOT) com> wrote:

Paul <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote:

[..]

LOL, with CPanel one can install a blog and a wiki AFAIK with 2 mouse
clicks and entering some values. So we're already getting close.

I'm not on a Linux server

Oh, don't worry, I run WikiMedia, WordPress, and even phpBB on XP :-D.

You hand your bloody Wiki <G>

Aye. I saw bluefrog being ddosed of the net. And that was IIRC just one
angry spammer.

Who, no doubt has the FBI etc onto him

I have no idea if the FBI can do anything in Russia :-) Moreover, if the
FBI had that much power, why do I still get every day that shit? The USA
is in the top 3 of spam sending countries IIRC.

Depends on the offence. If they hack a USA server, then they will.
plh
Paul
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Paul <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote:

On 10 Sep 2006 22:47:09 GMT, John Bokma <john (AT) castleamber (DOT) com> wrote:

Paul <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote:

[..]

Oh, don't worry, I run WikiMedia, WordPress, and even phpBB on XP :-D.

You hand your bloody Wiki <G

:-D. Like I said, it's a better place to store links. I now and then also
copy paste stuff I read on Usenet into it. Disadvantage is that it takes
some time to organize and categorize links. Advantage is that when someone
asks for links, I can often give a handful in one go (after some editing).

Aye. I saw bluefrog being ddosed of the net. And that was IIRC just
one angry spammer.

Who, no doubt has the FBI etc onto him

I have no idea if the FBI can do anything in Russia :-) Moreover, if
the FBI had that much power, why do I still get every day that shit?
The USA is in the top 3 of spam sending countries IIRC.

Depends on the offence. If they hack a USA server, then they will.

Afaik: bluefrog closed down their service (bothering spammers). People are
now working on a distributed open source solution:

http://www.okopipi.org/

My most optimistic view is that we will see nothing coming out of the
project for the next 10 months :-)

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Yeah. You feel unmotivated to post at such places. Wikipedia has it for
their userpages, for example. It sucks!

Personally, I'm glad they do. Someone scraped a Wiki article to build
a few thousand spam domains, and the article contained a hyperlink to
my site. All of a sudden I had around 2,000 extra inbound links from
spam sites.

Phil Payne wrote:

Yeah. You feel unmotivated to post at such places. Wikipedia has it for
their userpages, for example. It sucks!

Personally, I'm glad they do. Someone scraped a Wiki article to build
a few thousand spam domains, and the article contained a hyperlink to
my site. All of a sudden I had around 2,000 extra inbound links from
spam sites.

And this is bad... how?

--
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"KimmoA" <kimmoa (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

Phil Payne wrote:
Yeah. You feel unmotivated to post at such places. Wikipedia has it
for their userpages, for example. It sucks!

Personally, I'm glad they do. Someone scraped a Wiki article to
build a few thousand spam domains, and the article contained a
hyperlink to my site. All of a sudden I had around 2,000 extra
inbound links from spam sites.

And this is bad... how?

Google seems to divide the Internet into good and bad neighborhoods. Links
coming from bad ones seem to have a negative impact. This however
disagrees a statement on their site (IIRC), that you can't affect ranking
of someone else's site in a negative way.

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John Bokma wrote:

Google seems to divide the Internet into good and bad neighborhoods. Links
coming from bad ones seem to have a negative impact. This however
disagrees a statement on their site (IIRC), that you can't affect ranking
of someone else's site in a negative way.

I know that they claim this, but to be honest, I find it very hard to
believe.

--
http://www.kimmoa.se/

"KimmoA" <kimmoa (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

John Bokma wrote:
Google seems to divide the Internet into good and bad neighborhoods.
Links coming from bad ones seem to have a negative impact. This
however disagrees a statement on their site (IIRC), that you can't
affect ranking of someone else's site in a negative way.

I know that they claim this, but to be honest, I find it very hard to
believe.

Like I said: it is a contradiction: you can't negatively affect a site you
don't own, yet there are bad neigborhoods.

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John Need help with SEO? Get started with a SEO report of your site:

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"John Bokma" <john (AT) castleamber (DOT) com> wrote

"KimmoA" <kimmoa (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

John Bokma wrote:
Google seems to divide the Internet into good and bad neighborhoods.
Links coming from bad ones seem to have a negative impact. This
however disagrees a statement on their site (IIRC), that you can't
affect ranking of someone else's site in a negative way.

I know that they claim this, but to be honest, I find it very hard to
believe.

Like I said: it is a contradiction: you can't negatively affect a site you
don't own, yet there are bad neigborhoods.

Well, that is really not what Google states. They say "almost nothing a
competitor can do"
http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=34449

Meaning that yes, they can be something someone can do to harm your site.:-)

Stacey
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