Sebastian’s Pamphlets

I’ve asked Adam Lasnik, Google’s search evangelist:

Adam, what is Google’s take on extending the nofollow functionality by working out a microformat that covers the existing mechanism w/o being that unclear and confusing, and which takes care of similar needs like section targeting on element level and qualified votes as well?

and he answered

Sebastian, nothing’s set in stone. Stuff is likely to evolve

That’s an elating signal, thank you Adam. And it leads to a bunch of questions.

Will Google continue to cook nofollow in its secret sauce, revealing morphed semantics (affiliate links), unpopular areas of application (paid links) and changed functionality (no longer fetching the linked resource) every now and then? From my interpretation of Google’s ongoing move to candidness I guess not.

Will Google gather a couple search companies to work out a new standard? I hope not, it would be a mistake not to involve content providers, webmasters, publishers, CMS vendors, even SEOs and opinion makers again.

Will Google ask for input? Will the process of defining a standard for micro crawler directives be an open and public discussion? Are we talking about an extended microformat, limited to the A element’s rel and rev attributes, or does Google think of a broader approach covering for example section targeting and other crawler directives in class attributes on block level too? Will a new or more powerful standard interfere other norms like tag, vote links, XFN, or drafts like the not yet that comprehensive robots-exclusion microformat (also badly named because it covers inclusion too)? By the way, the links above lead you to interesting thoughts on reach, functionality and implementation of an extended norm replacing nofollow, and I, like many of you, have a couple more ideas and concepts in mind.

I take Adam’s tidbit as call for participation. Dear no-to-nofollow-sayers and nofollow-supporters out there, join the crowd at the white board! Throw in your thoughts, concepts, wishes and ideas.

In the meantime make use of this catalogue of do-follow plugins.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Link-Condom rel=nofollow Google Yahoo MSN

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I don’t want to make this the nofollow-blog, but since more and more good folks don’t love the nofollow-beast any more, here is a follow-up on the recent nofollow discussion. Follow the no-to-nofollow trend here:

Loren Baker posts 13 very good reasons why rel=nofollow sucks. He got dugg, buried, but tons of responses in the comments, where most people state that rel=nofollow was a failure with regard to the current amount of comment spam, because the spammers spam for traffic, not link love. Well, that’s true, but rel=nofollow at least nullifies the impact spamming of unmoderated blogs had on search results, says Google. Good point, but is it fair to penalize honest comment authors by nofollow’ing their relevant links by default? Not really. The search engines should work harder on solving this problem algorithmically, and CMS vendors should go back to the white board to develop a reasonable solution. Matt Mullenweg from WordPress admits that “in hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect [in fighting comment spam]”, and I hope this insight triggers a well thought out workflow replacing the unethical nofollow-by-default (see follow you, follow me).

At Google’s Webmaster Help Center regular posters nag Googlers with questions like Is rel=nofollow becoming the norm? Google’s search evangelist Adam Lasnik stepped in and states “As you might have noticed, many of the world’s most successful sites link liberally to other sites, and this sort of thing is often appreciated by and rewarded by visitors. And if you’re editorially linking to sites you can personally vouch for, I can’t see a reason to no-follow those.” and “On the whole [nofollow thingie], while Matt’s been pretty forthcoming and descriptive, I do think we Googlers on the whole can do a better job in explaining and justifying nofollow“. Thanks Adam, while explaining Google’s take on rel=nofollow to the great unwashed, why not start a major clean-up to extend this microformat and to make it useful, useable and less confusing for the masses?

While waiting for actions promised by the nofollow inventor, here is a good summary of nofollow clarifications by Googlers. I’ve a ton of respect for Matt, I know he listens and picks reasonable arguments even from negative posts, so stay tuned (I do hope my tiny revamp-nofollow campaign is not seen as negative press by the way).

A very good starting point to examine the destructive impact rel=nofollow had, has, and will have if not revamped, is Carsten Cumbrowski’s essay explaining why rel=nofollow leverages mistrust among people. I do not provide quotes because I want you all to read and reread this great article.

Robert Scoble rethinking his nofollow support says “I was wrong about “NoFollow” … I’m very concerned, for instance, about Wikipedia’s use of nofollow“. Scroll down, don’t miss out on the comments.

Michael Gray’s strong statement Google’s policy on No follow and reviews is hypocritical and wrong is worth a read, he’s backing his point of view providing a complete nofollow-history along with many quotes and nofollow-tidbits.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Link-Condom rel=nofollow Google Yahoo MSN

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I pretty much dislike the rel=nofollow fiasco for various reasons, especially its ongoing semantic morphing and often unethical implementation. Recently I wrote about nofollow-confusion and beginning nofollow-insane. Meanwhile the nofollow-debacle went a major step forwards: bloggers fight huge black holes (the completely link-condomized Wikipedia) with many tiny black holes (plug-ins castrating links leading to Wikipedia).

Folks, do you realize that actually you’ve joined the nofollow-nightmare you’re ranting about? Instead of trying to change things with constructive criticism addressing nofollow-supporters, you take the Old Testament approach, escalating an IMHO still remediable aberration. This senseless attitude supports the hapless nofollow-mechanism by the way. You’re acting like defiant kids crying “nofollow is sooooo unfair” while you strike back with tactical weapons unsuitable to solve the nofollow-problem. Devaluing Wikipedia links because Wikipedia is de facto an untrusted source of information OTOH makes sound sense, although semantically rel=nofollow is not the right way to go in this case.

I understand that losing the (imputed!) link juice of a couple Wikipedia links is not nice. However, I don’t buy that these links were boosting SE rankings in the first place -although a few sites having only Wikipedia inbound links drop out of the SERPs currently-, their real value is extremely well targeted traffic, and these links are still clickable.

I agree that Wikipedia’s decision to link-condomize all outbound links is a thoughtless, lazy, and pretty insufficient try to fight vandalizing link droppers. It is even “unfair”, because the black hole Wikipedia now sucks the whole Web’s link juice while giving nothing (except nicely targeted traffic) in return. But I must admit that there were not that many options, since there are no search engine crawler directives on link level providing the granularity Wikipedia probably needs.

Lets imagine the hapless nofollow value of the REL attribute would not exist. In this scenario Wikipedia could implement 4-eyes link tagging as follows:
1. New outgoing links would get tagged rel=”unapproved”. Search engines would not count a vote for the link destination, but follow the link.
2. Later on, when a couple trusted users and/or admins have approved the link, “unapproved” would get removed forever (URL and REL values stored in combination with the article’s URL to automatically reinstate the link’s stage on edits where a link gets removed, added, removed and added again…). So far that would even work with the misguiding “nofollow” value, but an extended microformat would allow meaningful followup-tags like “example”, “source”, “inventor”, “norm”, “worstenemy”, “hownotto” or whatever.

Instead of ranting and vandalizing links we should begin to establish a RFC on crawler directives on HTML element level. That would be a really productive approach.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Link-Condom rel=nofollow Google Yahoo MSN Wikipedia

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