Tom_Dalton - 10:35 pm on Apr 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

Wow. One more thought.

If news organization A posts a story about fraudulent, spammy news organization B, including a link, site B gets a boost in their TrustRank.

As more people start talking about how bad site B is, site B keeps getting more trustworthy.

This has always been a potential problem with PageRank -- a link is not necessarily a vote FOR the target site -- but consolidating influence among fewer sites increases the potential for mistakes like this.

Stupid suggestion to alleviate this: apply the "nofollow" attribute in cases like this as well, and teach everyone to use it when they don't want to help the sites they're linking to.