Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
during the first hype of the rel=nofollow tag, I emailed Google with a question. I sent this email on January 24.
I laid out the scenario, that I wanted to set links to my competitors on my own webpages, in order to convince my potential customers that my offerings are the best. However I do NOT want to give those competitors extra link-exposure in the eyes of a search engine. So I asked Google, if it would be OK to use the nofollow tag on these links.
From the very definition of the tag, my suggested use would NOT be ok, since it is only intended for pages where visitors can create unmoderated/uncontrolled links.
However, a Google engineer replied, that this would be a perfectly good use for the tag, because it provided useful information to my visitors while at the same time prevents pagerank being passed from my site to my competitions. It's against the TOS to quote from personal emails, but I assure you he used exactly this line of argument!
In my eyes, this is a wildcard to use the nofollow-tag for whatever purpose along the lines of link-quality you like.
Vadim.
The spiders were having a problem with getting lost in the wingdings, so I added in "robots-noindex" meta tags for those pages. Unforunately, when a robot visits a widget page it doesn't know if the wingding pages being pointed to have content or not.
I've put in the "rel-nofollow" attribute on the links to wingding pages with no details to give the spiders a hint that they don't need to go down that path. If the spiders take the hint, I hope to see a decrease in the spiders getting lost in the weeds.
Until (or unless) Google decides to make another deep crawl attempt on my site I won't know what the results are. I'm sure some more tuning will be needed later, but we'll see what the results of this test are first.
the URLs in question are provided by a third party so we can't use robots.txt.
You use LivePerson/HumanClick?
link (nofollow) -> tracker page -> 302 -> advertiser site
That page will then 302 redirect the clicker to the advertiser's site, and since I don't want to hurt that site, we opted for using the nofollow link attribute.
Now, if our advertiser's site dissapear from SERPs and are replaced with the URl to our tracking domain, I will know for sure that Google still follows, indexes and passes PR even when rel-nofollow is used.
Just to touch on this briefly. From a quality viewpoint, shouldnt this also be saying, "Googlebot, view this page with a critical eye, its unmoderated and contains unreviewed links to other sites of unknown quality, so might therefore not be the best of resources out there for this particular topic."
If Google are now saying OFFICIALLY that use of nofollow is ok on human-edited pages then I thinks it's relevant.
Kaled.
I almost missed GoogleGuy's comment - after all the thread is only 2 pages yet, and stuff that gets him to respond usually runs to tens of pages right :-)
From the very definition of the tag, my suggested use would NOT be ok, since it is only intended for pages where visitors can create unmoderated/uncontrolled links.
It's not intended solely for areas where content is generated automatically. It's useful anytime you don't want to or can't vouch for a link. That's not misuse of the attribute.
If Google are now saying OFFICIALLY that use of nofollow is ok on human-edited pages then I thinks it's relevant.
That's exactly why I started this thread. What is written in Googles definition, and what I got confirmed by mail and now already TWICE here by GoogleGuy seem to me to be some completely different if not even contradictory statements.
GoogleGuy: is this just Googles point of view, or are the other engines who started the nofollow-effort along with Google happy with this definition as well?
I wonder how long it will be before TR is consigned to the dustbin. I haven't studied tha maths but, intuitively, it seems to me that it has potential to spawn corruption on a massive scale.
Kaled.
