Nofollow, What a Load of Crap!
Having considered much of the information imparted from the SES London Organic Session yesterday morning I am not sure if I am more or less confused now about the whole rel=”nofollow” issue.
Appears to me that if you don’t want to get screwed in Google then you should use the rel=”nofollow” tag for sites that you link to but which you don’t trust. But hold on a minute. If you don’t trust the site why in the hell would you link to it in the first place!?
I am now left wondering what the hell the whole point of this rel=”nofollow” tag is at all!!
Currently I am using nofollow because I like to air on the side of caution. This is not because I don’t trust the sites that I am linking to, its just because after what recently happened to David Naylor I am concerned that there is an algorithmic measure which downgrades your listing in the SERPS based on how many or the ratio of do follow links there are on your site.
I just don’t understand the whole concept of this bloody nofollow crap!! To me its just a massive contradiction in every possible way.
February 21st, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I think nofollows wre mainly introduced so website owners could show Google the difference between paid and organic links which follows the policy of Google disliking paid links being used for link building..
In other words, I wouldn’t put nofollows on any links that are in the content and are relevant to it as these should be seen as dofollows and should count as a ‘vote’ because I value the link, but I would if it was for example an affiliate link..
February 21st, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Thanks for the comment Nicolien. I definatly agree that what you said is correct, I beleive that the tag has far to wide of an implication. What I mean by this is that, in effect, its left down to peoples judgement which links they should tag and which they should not. I think this in itself is open to too much interpretation, confusion and also in a sense if you do use the tag, say for example to link to a political party or the white house, then surely that is verging on deformation of charachter.
In addition to this I also think google should be doing this job not asking webmasters to. You gave affiliate links as an exaple. well as we all know, linking to affiliates, is bad for SEO rankings so many people try to mask these type of links. Instead they are asking us to nofollow these links, but sure they are still going to hurt your rankings. You can’t expect that if you have a site which is full of no-followed affiliate links that its going to rank well.
Basically they are asking the SEO industry to fall in line. The reason being so that they can make more money from adsense. Its all a conspiracy and a contradication against the business values which they are always harping on about i.e. do no evil, freedom of data, all the stuff. Its just rubbish. They are a corporate monster like every other company out there.
Rant over!
March 6th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Ah! the good old nofollow debate, we tested it a while ago, got a new domain, new hosted, bit of text and then sent one nofollow text link to that page, bang it appeared in the index as happy as can be.
Considering how long it took for robot.txt to become a convention as some people still don’t use I predict that nofollow will never become a fully used convention across the board.