13 replies to this topic

[nethy]

Twitter & nofollow desicions
The comments are an interesting part. Of course you have the complaints that good users/links 'deserve' pagerank.

When Google first demanded that ads have 'nofollow' placed on them & the whole thing got some attention, I was thinking about this and it all seemed unsustainable. The user generated content side of things anyway. The ads thing is of much less consequence. I thought it was a very unimpressive baby-bathwater ratio.

The problem as I see it is this: Most of the 'it isn't a problem' arguments are somewhere around 'if you think it deserves PR, don't nofollow.' The problem is of course the webmaster deciding.

For a site like twitter, spam is more of a problem then not passing their users PR. They have no incentive to moderate their use of nofollow. As is the case in most popular user generated sites. After all, nofollow links don't hurt the source site. Why not use them. Then with CMSs used by companies etc. Why not nofollow all external links? Some 'SEO's might recommend it. No cost.
Problem is that user generated content sites are becoming a big chunk of the internet. Possibly the part with the most important 'recommendations.' How can an SE analyse how all the pages on the internet relate to each other when they cut out all these extremely central sites.

Anyway, I thought this is an example of how SEs are becoming blind to the new areas of the web. Or (maybe more likely?) how they can't actually do what they say they would and pretend a nofollowed link didn't exist.

That brings me to a second point (one for Jill I guess. It's a little awkward bringing up articles/news/external sources in a forum of this kind. Time for HR 2.0 ? Maybe you can have a look at something like this.

* I know some social news sites actually remove the nofollow for submissions that have been positively moderated enough. It surprises me that they bother.

edit: Even worse spelling then normal

Edited by nethy, 07 September 2008 - 11:25 PM.

[Jill]

There are a number of issues with the use of nofollow these days.

My thought is that eventually (if not already) nofollow will come to not mean anything because many websmasters are using it for all links without knowing what they're doing. If Google's algo is to work the way it's supposed to, that just won't do.

As far as nofollow and twitter (and other profile type pages), I'm very familiar with this situation, and was in fact seemingly one of the few on twitter the day they nofollowed all the profile links who was not up in arms over it.

Sure, I had my bio link in place and was presumably getting link juice passed from it. I saw someone mention they turned those off, and I thought to myself, oh well...it was only a matter of time...and then I moved on to start working for the day.

Later in the day I saw everyone on Twitter all a buzz and pissed as hell at Matt Cutts for allegedly bullying twitter into removing those nofollows. (He had sent a note to the head of Twitter pointing out the links that were not nofollowed.) I personally don't believe that pointing out something is the same as bullying, but many others disagreed.

The problem for twitter is that people were indeed spamming that profile bio area where the links were not nofollowed. Some were putting in 4 links even. And you know people were creating new twitter profiles just for the links.

Heck, we all know that SEOs (not us, but others ) will exploit any hole they find until it's ruined for everyone, and that's exactly what they did. Twitter did the right thing to stop it in its tracks. Now those who create Twitter accounts will do it (presumably) for the right reasons...because they want to participate in the conversation.

But I do think that nofollow, in general, will be ignored shortly if not already. Google will have to find some other way of deciding which links are real and which are not to be trusted.

[nethy]

Yes. I wasn't criticising the specific use of nofollow. Just the concept. Twitter have no reason to open any doors to spam. No reason not to throw out the baby with the bathwater because it's not their baby. it's webasters' & google's baby. Why not nofollow everything from their perspective?

But supposedly now twitter, stumbleupon, youtube etc. are not part of the web any more from Google's Algo's perspective. That can't work. Can it?

[Jill]

Exactly. Which is why nofollow will be meaningless soon (if not already).

[nethy]

hmm.

If I look at this thread (or any other thread). It's user generated. But it contains useful information via the links, anchor text, link context words around the links - the whole link-juice shebang. Just seems unbelievable that Google, so meticulous about this sort of thing, is just going to ignore that information.


btw Jill, whadayatink o' dis for HR: http://slinkset.com ?

Edited by nethy, 08 September 2008 - 07:56 PM.

[Jill]

btw Jill, whadayatink o' dis for HR: http://slinkset.com ?

Thanks for giving me something else to play with while I'm supposed to be writing the newsletter.

I set up a High Rankings account...will have to give it a thorough look later though!

[nethy]

Thanks for giving me something else to play with while I'm supposed to be writing the newsletter.

I set up a High Rankings account...will have to give it a thorough look later though!

Welcome?

Is there a way of synching passwords/users?

[bobgentry]

Looking in Google Webmasters I can see links from pages that are set to nofollow. Maybe Google are ignoring it already

[Randy]

Looking in Google Webmasters I can see links from pages that are set to nofollow. Maybe Google are ignoring it already

I don't think we can make this assumption bobgentry. Webmaster tools has always shown nofollow links, regardless. If we go all the way back to a post by Google employee Adam Lasnik from early 2007 you'll see that he says, in part

nofollow links aren't listed any differently than other
links in our Webmaster Tools backlinks section.

The short version being that you can't rely on it being a fact that just because a linking url shows up in Google's link: command or in Webmaster Tools being equal to the link actually passing any link value. It may, and it may not. The fact that it shows up in one of these tools tell you nothing about PR.

Can this be confusing?

Undoubtedly yes it can. Especially when the same Google employee confirmed just a day earlier that nofollow links aren't even crawled unless the page is found being linked to elsewhere.

Frankly, nofollow has been a dismal failure from day one. The additional confusion by the official link reporting tools for the various search engines (Yahoo! reports nofollow links too, but have said they don't count them) just makes the failure more confusing.

[nethy]

Frankly, nofollow has been a dismal failure from day one. The additional confusion by the official link reporting tools for the various search engines (Yahoo! reports nofollow links too, but have said they don't count them) just makes the failure more confusing.

I trace the problem to this:

It may be in the SEs interest to say they ignore nofollow links. It's probably in the interest of the web. But it may not be in the SEs interest to actually ignore them. Unless of course they're caught and everyone agrees they're caught, in which case I don't who's favour it's in. Search competition is big. If it's even a minor disadvantage to ignore nofollowed links, they won't/can't.

[don h]

They'll follow and index pages pointed to by one single nofollow link. I have an experimental site situated on a folder on the production site. It's an exact copy of the production site. So when I was working on the experiment site I clicked on a youtube video embedded within a page and bam hours later Google was all over it. Nobody knows about this site, and I change the name of the folder periodically.

If Google indexes content pointed to by a nofollow link then I'd bet Y! and MSN does the same for competitive reasons. It would be stupid of them not to.

[nethy]

They'll follow and index pages pointed to by one single nofollow link. I have an experimental site situated on a folder on the production site. It's an exact copy of the production site.

Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but crawling & passing PR may be seperate.

[btreloar]

Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but crawling & passing PR may be seperate.

Does anyone have a high PR page with no links on it? Why not link to the page that has no other inbound links? That could be the basis for a great experiment to put this to the test, couldn't it?

[nethy]

Does anyone have a high PR page with no links on it? Why not link to the page that has no other inbound links? That could be the basis for a great experiment to put this to the test, couldn't it?

Problem is the toolbar PR is a bad gauge of actual PR. People don't trust it.

What I could see coming out of an experiment like this, even if you did set it up convincingly:

In a few months: 'wow!' I got a one or two on my toolbar PR & the page is climbing in the rankings (You'll probably want to monitor some obscure terms). The experimentor will be convinced but not the rest: 'Just because the Toolbar says... Doesn't mean anything. Uninstall it, it's stupid.' 'There are hundreds of parameters that go into ranking. PR is just one of them. You can't conclude anything from that.' etc.

Edited by nethy, 14 September 2008 - 06:03 PM.