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Not just Google, but all the major players in the search and blogging spheres. However, this is a Google initiative.
The specific method described is correct, and the rel attribute is designed to mark "untrusted links".
blog announcements:
[blogs.msdn.com...]
[sixapart.com...]
[ysearchblog.com...]
Bot content for bots - human content for humans. Been doing that for years.
But, but, but, ... but that's ... CLOAKING! Oh no!
But seriuosly: There's a zillion ways to hide links from the bot or to tell it not to follow links. This rel="nofollow" is just one more way to do the same thing. No need to franzy.
If Ford, Chryser, and GM got together with a plan to eliminate gasoline from cars, it would be an unfair trade practice, and considered collusion.
When Google, Yahoo, and MSN get toghether behind secret doors, be they real or virtual, in a premeditated manor to eliminate something that's collusion.
Despite the fact that blog spam may be unsavory it's not illegal.
Directory owners may be putting this link tag attribute in as default anyway, for all the free inclusions. This also allows an opportunity for directory owners to drop this attribute for the links of "special people" (members, advertisers, trusted editors, etc)
For that matter, forums could include this by default, and only drop it when a member's posts reach a certain number, or if the person is manually selected as trusted.
rel="external"I'm a rank amateur at this compared to many here. If I can think of at least a dozen ways of misusing this attribute, I'm sure the pros will be brimming with ideas. Surely, if you can control the value of your links at a granular level on each page of your site, this is a wonderful tool for removing decisional power over ranking from the search engines and placing it in the hands of site owners?
I sense the old guard advancing: "Thus, from the ashes of the yellowpages, arose . . .
(drum roll please)
An increasingly viable online yellowpages . . .
I hear a distant tsk-tsking and tittering of old men in suits.
[google.com...]
To quote:
Make pages for users, not for search engines.
How does this search-engine-specific attribute fit into this guiding principle? It has no meaning whatsoever for "users".
[edited by: encyclo at 2:20 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2005]
If Ford, Chryser, and GM got together with a plan to eliminate gasoline from cars, it would be an unfair trade practice, and considered collusion.
What if they get together and decide to force the consumer to pay for extra features like air bags and seatbelts?* Is that collusion? Or is it something less sinister?
* Of course, it didn't happen that way. But surely they would have been applauded if they'd taken the initiative. Even if those features don't always work, sometimes do harm to the operator, and in the case of seat belts don't even work unless the operator properly implements them.
How in the world can companies coming together to set a standard that has nothing to do with price be affected by anti-trust issues? Might some spammer or group of spammers try and challenge this new "standard" in a court of law citing anti-trust issues because this new tag has adversely affected their income?
Signed,
Ignorant in Miami
[edited for clarity]
[edited by: GaryK at 3:03 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2005]
Link relationships have been around for quite some time. I've been using them for years to group collections of documents together.
For instance, links defined by the LINK element may describe the position of a document within a series of documents.
The roles of a link defined by A or LINK are specified via the rel and rev attributes.
rel = link-types
This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.
rev = link-types
This attribute is used to describe a reverse link from the anchor specified by the href attribute to the current document. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.
The term granular was mentioned by encyclo. If the search engines really want to get granular, this is probably the method of doing so...
Although the above discusses the link element, this also applies to the anchor element. For example...
Site A links to Site B
<a rel="sponsor" href="Site B">Anchor Text</a>Site B links to Site A
<a rev="sponsor" href="Site A">Anchor Text</a>Note in the above example that I've used both
relrevrelrevOkay, there is much more than that. If you follow the links above and bury yourself there for a few hours, you'll find a wealth of information pertaining to A and LINK relationships.
By the way, I'm going to assume that all of those involved with this initiative have created what is called a profile. The exact reference is as follows...
The meaning of a property and the set of legal values for that property are defined in a reference lexicon called a profile.
The value of that
rel=""Additional Information
[edited by: pageoneresults at 4:46 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2005]
You thought you saw Google dance before?
PageRank everywhere is going to be radically restructured.
This is going to rewrite the web as we know it.
This has absolutely nothing to do with Blogs - blogs are a complete red herring here (though maybe, in the future, it will be more important as Blogs become more mainstream)
Hold onto your hats, folks! We're in for a wild wild wide.
in other news i see the tinfoil hat crew came out of the nuclear shelters over this
rev = link-types
This attribute is used to describe a reverse link from the anchor specified by the href attribute to the current document. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.
rel="home nofollow"
Multiple rel attributes cause a validation error.
rel="home nofollow"
Yes, this should work according to the specifications. It of course remains to be seen whether the syntax is supported by the search engines or whether it could lead to confusion.
I wonder if there would be support for setting the nofollow attribute for links to alternate content:
<link rel="alternate nofollow" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS feed" href="/index.rss" />
Multiple rel attributes cause a validation error.
Just performed a test of this validating against XHTML 1.0 Strict and multiple rel attributes do validate.
<a href="link.htm" rel="nofollow" rel="sponsor">Is invalid, whereas:
<a href="link.htm" rel="nofollow sponsor">Is valid.
To the bloggers who think this is going to fix anything: did turning off html links in posted comments deter spammers from your blog? Didn't mine.
Button pushing spammers use the shotgun approach, not a smart bomb. For every blogger who uses the new tag, there will still be thousands who don't -- why on earth would spammers stop?
Now the spammers (and spammers-to-be) KNOW that the SEs give value to blog links -- no more wondering about that.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! I do believe I'll go turn off comments in my blog.
Now the spammers (and spammers-to-be) KNOW that the SEs give value to blog links -- no more wondering about that.
Blog links passing value is well known, that's why it's a problem. Plus, "security through obscurity" applies here I think and is a flaky protection scheme.
People ought to know how much links matter to search engines considering how much search engine results matter to people.
OMG, this could radically and negatively change the face of the entire web, since the web no longer has a face except thru the eyes of SE's, for the most part.
This is the part that fascinates me, but, not what search engines think (which is how it is now) but rather what blog owners/webmasters think.
Also this new tag will help only those blogs where the blog is updated by its owner.
For bloggers running their own software on their own server, yes. For bloggers using a third-party to publish/host, it would be easy. Blogger, for example, could add "no follow" to all comments on every blog it hosts/publishes simply by re-publishing all of them (over time, of course).
>what all the fuss is about
Well, for one thing, there ain't been much to talk about for a while. After six slow news months, we finally got something. Say, maybe they're planning a big new update and this is a diversionary tactic. :-)
My confusion at this early stage centers around the observations/opinions that:
1) it will do far less than is being suggested WRT cleaning up the problem of blog spam, yet,
2) it continues the trend of tilting the game in favor of larger sites and SEO's who have the resources and/or skills to to fully leverage this for PR manipulation.
In other words, on it's face it seems counter to the interests of the SE's.
Will this new initiative be more effective than it seems?
Possibly, but it requires awareness, understanding, and broad-based involvement beyond that which might be expected to occur.
Will this new initiative really tilt things in favor of larger sites and more knowledgeable webmasters?
I think so. Yes, the points are validly made that various other tactics already exist to fool SE's, link parters, etc. WRT hiding links. But most if not all of these other tactics are at least slightly cumbersome.
Now, a webmaster has, with the simple use of a sanctioned tag, the ability to manipulate PR with pinpoint accuracy. This tool, in the hands of savvy webmasters with analytical 'button pusher' skills and tools (as covered in Jakes recent threads) give, for the sake of argument - a 10%-15% advantage to those savvy webmasters.
Your average small website owner simply doesn't have the time, interest or ability to get into that kind of analysis. The word granular has been appropriately used now a few times. That level of SEO will not be widely implemented.
Sanctioned link cloaking.
I'm still trying to get my head around this. It seems to create for the SE's far more problems than it solves. Which is why I keep wondering if I'm missing something. Wouldn't be the first time that that happened however.
Cavemom's favorite joke: Q: "Why is the spinning mouse?" A: "The more he spins, the much."
I doubt anyone currently using redirects on outbound links (this site included) will replace them with rel="nofollow" attributes. Who would want to give up knowing what links individual users clicked on?
I agree with some of the sentiment expressed earlier in about "nofollow" being a bad value. I would imagine Google will interpret it as "dontpasspagerank".
As a side note, there's been a tremendous amount of effort put into controlling 3rd party comments on a site (limiting HTML posts, moderation, banning, etc.). It seems most of these problems would just go away if comments were hosted by the poster and only referenced "backlink:" style to the original page when requested by the reader.
I've always thought it was kind of silly that browsers don't keep a mailbox-style archive of form POSTs.
PageRank everywhere is going to be radically restructured.This is going to rewrite the web as we know it.
This has absolutely nothing to do with Blogs - blogs are a complete red herring here.
Does anyone agree with this analysis?
The size of their links database has just dropped substantially and therefore the number of calculations needed to determine Pagerank (or similar) has dropped.
Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what percentage of links on the entire web blog/forum/guestbook links account for?
(If I had to guess I'd say anywhere from 5-20%... someone more well informed might have a more accurate figure.)
Now, add in the fact that many webmasters are going to use this attribute in their own internal (and in many cases - external) linking structure. This could account for another 5% (or more?) of the web's total links.
Regardless, there is a going to be a *HUGE* reduction, in the total number of SE visible links on the web.
SE updates just got a whole lot quicker/easier.
Dance Google dance! [Fires gun at floor near Google's feet]
:-)
I wish the SEs would come to a standard on that too. It took all of them just hours to agree on something good.
What if every Joe Webmaster used it? What the heck would be left for the search engines to index?
But they aren't going to. Not even everyone that should use it will use it.
Sure there will be people and sites that abuse it. It's not like you cannot abuse the system in the exact same way right now.
The majority of the web is produced by people that are scared to even look at HTML, much less do something minor like adding this attribute.
To get some idea about how many people would use this for any sort of SE advantage, go look around the web and see what percentage of the images have ALT attributes. I suspect that nofollow will be much lower.
Not to mention, the search engines can certainly evaluate the usage of nofollow on a site and even make that a ranking factor. If things become too bad, they can even decide that they will ignore that nofollow and go ahead and use those links in PR calculations. But I doubt that it will come to that because its usage will be limited.
