Todd Pinkerton

You probably know how google works.  Count the inbound links to your page; the more links, the higher the pagerank.  It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea behind the gajillion-dollar company that is Google. That, and something about advertising.

You may not be aware of the ‘nofollow’ link attribute, which lets website owners tell Google, “I do not trust this link on my page.” Google sees this, and doesn’t count that link toward the page’s pagerank.  Again, that’s the general principle.

There is hot debate around whether this nofollow link ttribute should be used or not. Some argue that yes, using nofollow keeps spammers from creating junk links on your site — link in the comments to this blog, or a message form. Without a way to discount user-generated links, those forums and blogs could be abused to the point of being unusable.  But take away the benefit of the spam, and (the theory goes) the spammers will stop targeting your site.

On the other hand, some say that nofollow is abused by big sites to effectively collect Google juice and boost their own pagerank, then refuse to share the love by ‘nofollowing’ all outbound links from their site — trusted or not.  For example, many bloggers link to sites like Stumbleupon and Twitter, but those sites (and others) have taken the policy to nofollow amy user-submitted url.  So the large sites implementing this policy benefit from all the inbound links to their site, but don’t give anyone they link to the same credit.

I’m more in the latter camp than the former, and think nofollow is pretty lame. Then again, I’m not fighting spammers all day.

But more than just ‘nofollow is lame’, I’ll go out on a limb and say “google is lame”.  The count-inbound-links algorithm that is Pagerank is susceptible to these kind of spam attacks, and nofollow is a band-aid on top of that. Google is basically saying, “the number of links to a site is a good indicator of the site’s relevance; except when its not.”  By obeying the nofollow attribute, Google then puts the power to decide which links are relevant and which aren’t in the hands of every website owner.  This is either brilliant or incredibly naive , I’m not quite sure.

I suggest that whoever figures out how to do this — using not just the number of inbound links, but somehow figuring out their quality in a fair and transparent way — has an opportunity to take on Google search.  You hear that, Bing?

To further spur discussion, I like this page which suggests a policy of nofollow reciprocity. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?