When you’re familiar with my various rants on the ever morphing rel-nofollow microformat infectious link disease, don’t read further. This post is not polemic, ironic, insulting, or otherwise meant to entertain you. I’m just raving about a way to delay the downfall of the InterWeb.
Lets recap: The World Wide Web is based on hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are supposed to lead humans to interesting stuff they want to consume. This simple and therefore brilliant concept worked great for years. The Internet grew up, bubbled a bit, but eventually it gained world domination. Internet traffic was counted, sold, bartered, purchased, and even exchanged for free in units called “hits”. (A “hit” means one human surfer landing on a sales pitch. That is a popup hell designed in a way that somebody involved just has to make a sale).
Then in the past century two smart guys discovered that links scraped from Web pages can be misused to provide humans with very accurate search results. They even created a new currency on the Web, and quickly assigned their price tags to Web pages. Naturally, folks began to trade green pixels instead of traffic. After a short while the Internet voluntarily transferred it’s world domination to the company founded by those two smart guys from Stanford.
Of course the huge amount of green pixel trades made the search results based on link popularity somewhat useless, because the webmasters gathering the most incoming links got the top 10 positions on the search result pages (SERPs). Search engines claimed that a few webmasters cheated on their way to the first SERPs, although lawyers say there’s no evidence of any illegal activities related to search engine optimization (SEO).
However, after suffering from heavy attacks from a whiny blogger, the Web’s dominating search engine got somewhat upset and required that all webmasters have to assign a machine-readable tag (link condom) to links sneakily inserted into their Web pages by other webmasters. “Sneakily inserted links” meant references to authors as well as links embedded in content supplied by users. All blogging platforms, CMS vendors and alike implemented the link condom, eliminating presumably 5.00% of the Web’s linkage at this time.
A couple of months later the world dominating search engine demanded that webmasters have to condomize their banner ads, intercompany linkage and other commercial links, as well as all hyperlinked references that do not count as pure academic citation (aka editorial links). The whole InterWeb complied, since this company controlled nearly all the free traffic available from Web search, as well as the Web’s purchasable traffic streams.
Roughly 3.00% of the Web’s links were condomized, as the search giant spotted that their users (searchers) missed out on lots and lots of valuable contents covered by link condoms. Ooops. Kinda dilemma. Taking back the link condom requirements was no option, because this would have flooded the search index with billions of unwanted links empowering commercial content to rank above boring academic stuff.
So the handling of link condoms in the search engine’s crawling engine as well as in it’s ranking algorithm was changed silently. Without telling anybody outside their campus, some condomized links gained power, whilst others were kept impotent. In fact they’ve developed a method to judge each and every link on the whole Web without a little help from their friends link condoms. In other words, the link condom became obsolete.
Of course that’s what they should have done in the first place, without asking the world’s webmasters for gazillions of free-of-charge man years producing shitloads of useless code bloat. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the balls to stand up and admit “sorry folks, we’ve failed miserably, link condoms are history”. Therefore the Web community still has to bother with an obsolete microformat. And if they -the link comdoms- are not dead, then they live today. In your markup. Hurting your rankings.
If you, dear reader, are a Googler, then please don’t feel too annoyed. You may have thought that you didn’t do evil, but the above said reflects what webmasters outside the ‘Plex got from your actions. Don’t ignore it, please think about it from our point of view. Thanks.
Still here and attentive? Great. Now lets talk about scenarios in WebDev where you still can’t avoid rel-nofollow. If there are any — We’ll see.
PageRank™ sculpting
Dude, PageRank™ sculpting with rel-nofollow doesn’t work for the average webmaster. It might even fail when applied as high sophisticated SEO tactic. So don’t even think about it. Simply remove the rel=nofollow from links to your TOS, imprint, and contact page. Cloak away your links to signup pages, login pages, shopping carts and stuff like that.
Link monkey business
I leave this paragraph empty, because when you know what you do, you don’t need advice.
Affiliate links
There’s no point in serving A elements to Googlebot at all. If you haven’t cloaked your aff links yet, go see a SEO doctor.
Advanced SEO purposes
See above.
So what’s left? User generated content. Lets concentrate our extremely superfluous condomizing efforts on the one and only occasion that might allow to apply rel-nofollow to a hyperlink on request of a major search engine, if there’s any good reason to paint shit brown at all.
Blogging
If you link out in a blog post, then you vouch for the link’s destination. In case you disagree with the link destination’s content, just put the link as
<strong class="blue_underlined" title="http://myworstenemy.org/" onclick="window.location=this.title;">My Worst Enemy</strong>
or so. The surfer can click the link and lands at the estimated URI, but search engines don’t pass reputation. Also, they don’t evaporate link juice, because they don’t interpret the markup as hyperlink.
Blog comments
My rule of thumb is: Moderate, DoFollow quality, DoDelete crap. Install a conditional do-follow plug-in, set everything on moderation, use captchas or something similar, then let the comment’s link juice flow. You can maintain a white list that allows instant appearance of comments from your buddies.
Forums, guestbooks and unmoderated stuff like that
Separate all Web site areas that handle user generated content. Serve “index,nofollow” meta tags or x-robots-headers for all those pages, and link them from a site map or so. If you gather index-worthy content from users, then feed crawlers the content in a parallel -crawlable- structure, without submit buttons, perhaps with links from trusted users, and redirect human visitors to the interactive pages. Vice versa redirect crawlers requesting live pages to the spider fodder. All those redirects go with a 301 HTTP response code.
If you lack the technical skills to accomplish that, then edit your /robots.txt file as follows:
User-agent: Googlebot
# Dear Googlebot, drop me a line when you can handle forum pages
# w/o rel-nofollow crap. Then I'll allow crawling.
# Treat that as conditional disallow:
Disallow: /forum
As soon as Google can handle your user generated content naturally, they might send you a message in their Webmaster console.
Anything else
Judge yourself. Most probably you’ll find a way to avoid rel-nofollow.
Conclusion
Absolutely nobody needs the rel-nofollow microformat. Not even search engines for the sake of their index. Hence webmasters as well as search engines can stop wasting resources. Farewell rel="nofollow", rest in peace. We won’t miss you.
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