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View Full Version : Your thoughts on the 'nofollow' attribute


DaveMiller
Jan 21st, 2005, 10:58 PM
I saw the post at the Google Blog about the 'nofollow' attribute and initially I did not think much of it. I am not seeing any spam on my blogs, so I really did not care.

But today I get a phone call from my business partner (and this is the reason we are in business together) and he says "we have to do a podcast about Dave Winer's 'nofollow' tag thing". Obviously I say why? He quickly says to me that it is going to ruin many great blogs when it comes to the search engines.

That is all that he would say. But knowing that he is one of the top SEO's in the country, I took his word for it and prepared myself for this exciiting podcast.

So we did the podcast and he explained to me and to all why the 'nofollow' attribute created by Dave Winer (and asked for by the SE's) is not going to be good for the big-time blogger (and soon to be podcasters). I agree with him, knowing what I know about how SE's work, this could certainly ruin much of the work that many bloggers have put into creating their outgoing links and gathering incoming links.

I am curious to know what you think of the whole thing. We did the podcast and you can listen to you. Go find my show, The Miller Report, and give it a listen.

ccarella
Jan 22nd, 2005, 09:10 AM
I am curious to know what you think of the whole thing. We did the podcast and you can listen to you. Go find my show, The Miller Report, and give it a listen.

I think it's an elegant way to prevent the Usenet spammings coming back to us. A popular blog or podcast doesn't need to rely on Google-Cred.

The real question is, how long til someone decides to make a crawler that uses google-like algorithms and *only* reads the nofollow tag to index and rank blogs/podcasts?

DaveMiller
Jan 22nd, 2005, 09:26 AM
A popular blog or podcast doesn't need to rely on Google-Cred.

I don't think many bloggers even know about, yet even understand page rank. But what they may understand is traffic and AdSense. Once those things start going down because they are not being found on the SE's, and I am not just talking about Google, they are not going to understand why. Next thing you know the question of doubt enters the bloggers mind and they ask themselves, "is this worth it?". Now you have blogs disappearing (and don't get me wrong, many of them are useless) and I don't you or anybody wants that.

cc_chapman
Jan 22nd, 2005, 11:21 AM
I'm actually happy about it. SixApart released this plug in for Movable Type and I've downloaded and it and plan to install it.

I get a ton of comment spam and while MT BLacklist is keeping it in check I still get plenty of it and hopefully this will cut down on that since it will be pointless to do now.

I agree that I don't think many bloggers know about it just yet.

cybercooler
Dec 12th, 2005, 01:18 PM
The "no follow" is not 100% but its recommended by clickbank.com to discourage search engines (As I have a "success" page where people can download an ebook of mine).

They said it works "pretty good" and a person would only find my website by accident.