62 replies to this topic

[Randy]

Matt Cutts told his readers nofollow can be used in this way, and I see no reason why he would intentionally mislead his many fans.

Now that's the funniest thing I've heard this year!

[don h]

Now that's the funniest thing I've heard this year!

Well I'm sure Matt's job does have an influence on what he might say, but surely for something such as nofollow, why would there be a reason to lie and then tell people to use it as an alternative to meta tags, and robots.txt.

A cpl weeks back or so I was trying to find his input on Google bowling and found nothing even though I saw alot of his readers asking about it, I think instead he's staying mute on the topic because certain websites are vunerable and admitting to it would look bad on Google. But as far as him spreading blatant misinformation, I see no logical motive behind it. If you have any examples of him spreading misinformation then by all means, point me to a link.

I did notice a competitor buying edu text links awhile back, I reported their site, and Google hasn't banned it, but it does not appear that those edu links are helping their SERPs any. Of course this site is paying adwords lots of money, is pretty old, and even has been rewarded sitelinks, so I'm not surprised that Google hasn't banned it.

[nethy]

At the end of the day, Google is recognizing that it cannot say: 'imagine we didn't exist.' It's like the tax office saying tax 'imagine we didn't exist,' when you tax would otherwise be a major factor in the desicions you make. It's a regime that couldn't last the size and importance of SE traffic. Ethics has nothing to do with it. If Google gave higher rankings to red sites I would probably make all sites red. Unless the redness did more harm then SEO benefit.

I actually didn't mind Google allowing webmasters to use nofollow do discourage spam, or shape pagerank or 'allow' anything else. I have a problem when they require things. I suppose the line gets blurry though.