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January 24, 2005

Google Spam Medicine Worse Than Problem It "Cures"

Google's new comment spam "cure" is also a poison that harms the powerful inter-linking process that blogs use to create much benefit on the internet.

As you know, one way in which blogs add value to the web is by linking to other sites. They help other sites in 2 ways (1) introduces the sites to the blog's readers (2) less known but more important -- it introduces the site to the Search Engines.

In a web where links are available for sale, bloggers freely link to other sites for no commercial gain. They benefit those sites and spread the word about something useful they offer.

Take a look at last post I made in this blog: its purely designed to give credit to a site that has helped me learn something. It might give them better search engine rankings as well as being found by readers of that post.

But Google's new "nofollow" tag can stop this linking benefit from occurring. The new "nofollow" tag does only one thing. It prevents links from from being followed by search engines.

Apparently this tag was created to deflate blog comment spammers but as Jim Pryke first explained to me the nofollow tag can have a lot of extra non-beneficial uses.

Brian Turner of Platinax Internet explained further in his excellent article where he gave 5 examples of potential selfish, culture-changing uses of the nofollow tag. Here are 3:

• "Hide reciprocated links so that search engines think that your link popularity is all one-way.
• As a directory owners try to preserve PageRank by crippling outgoing content links
• As a Forum Admin cripple all posted links by member, to conserve your incoming PageRank"

There's more information in Brian's very good article.

This blog is built using the Movable Type software by Six Apart. The folks at Six Apart appear to support the new initiative, but they don't say if they'll implement it in new releases of their software.

Posted by onelukey at January 24, 2005 11:02 AM

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Posted by: James at February 28, 2005 12:26 PM

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