Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links
webmasters.googleblog.com
webmasters.googleblog.com
Personal publishing has moved almost entirely to platforms that `nofollow` links. And commercial sites do whatever it takes to avoid linking anywhere but back, deeper into their own site.
There have been some cases where I think people are behaving somewhat irresponsible with "nofollow": the German Wikipedia, for example, does it to all outbound links.
That's understandable from a spam-fighting perspective. But, if search engines actually implement it draconically, it deprives the search index of vast amounts of collaborative filtering.
I actually just checked, and couldn't find nofollows on either HN or Reddit links. Are they somehow setting them via some method other than the actual link tag?
In any case, I was going to suggest that nofollow makes sense for the "new" queue, but it wouldn't hurt and possibly help to remove it once user generated content has reached certain milestones, i. e. user karma, or hitting the front page.
A reasonable improvement to this, to reinvigorate the hyperlink: social media platforms could stop using nofollow for links put in by users who themselves have built up a degree of reputation.
Is Google afraid of losing that signal? I don't have any data to back this up, but my guess is that Google's reliance on PageRank is greatly diminished now, and they probably use search result click-through rate and website engagement data (from Google Analytics and ads) as the primary signals for website relevance and quality.
Wouldn't that also give a lot more incentive to reach those milestones illegitemately?
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types
The only reason that Google is able to do this is because things that don’t know what rel=“usg” means will silently ignore it.
<!--[if gte IE 6 ]><![endif]-->
Extending link types is in the html specification:
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#other-link...
> Extensions to the predefined set of link types may be registered in the microformats wiki existing-rel-values page [http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values#HTML5_link_...].
where "may" is defined in the usual way (they aren't in there, but the page hasn't been updated for over a year, so I'm not sure if anyone cares about it anymore after already adding so many extension values).
It's common to have user agent (in this case googlebot) specific rel values.
well unless you're waiting for the second coming for someone official to come along and bless an RFC, all standards are born of a collaborative space where everything can change at any time. Versions are just snapshots, and good luck if you want to stick with one forever (hows that TLS 1.0 server going to work out after March 2020?).
Anyways, if you want an official© W3 spec, here it is in HTML5 https://www.w3.org/TR/html50/links.html#other-link-types, HTML 4.01 https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links, or hey, even back to HTML 2 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1866#section-5.7.3
[1]: http://sgmljs.net/
See also; microdata, and the monthly alerts I get from Google about the content of my sites being malformed, yet they validate just fine in a dozen other tools.
If this keeps up, eventually we'll have to log in to Google to provide it with with the URLs of new content, and fill in all of the meta data about each page. All in the name of whatever buzzword Big G comes up with that month.
Logging into Google and providing it with the URLs isn't analogous because that only benefits Google, it provides a barrier to the entry of competition, which isn't good for us users.
Sure, if it were used for the benefit of the public, rather than the benefit of Google.
FWIW, most people who care about their search ranking would absolutely love a tool like this. The point of the automated crawl isn't just to find the information, it's because if you let people submit their own content to the index they'll lie about what it is.
IMO if you mean that Google should check linked-to content rather than relying on link qualifiers, Google has been doing a bad job in recent years, as I can't find useful material among an ocean of low-effort clickbait most of the time. OTOH, relying on metadata by publishers won't solve this problem.
It's not clear that there's any benefits for me.
And it's vague enough that I don't know that there are not downsides.
Seems best to do nothing.
If you're going to treat specific sites specially, then go in all the way and be prepared to have your logic understand any/all aspects of their structure. Or else, don't bother.
I donno, seems legit to me. Adding "nofollow" just means "I'm not accountable for this" -- it's overloaded to mean both "My site is linking here but I didn't vet it first" (the UGC version), versus "This isn't actually me, it's an advertiser borrowing space on my site" (the sponsored version).
Your site/forum might want "credit" for being a sort of attention aggregation hub without necessarily taking responsibility for all the content your users post -- you may want a softer middle ground if such a thing becomes available. But in the advertiser version you're just renting out page real estate; your relationship with those links ends the moment the ad is displayed.
Giving you a way to differentiate between the two could let you benefit from ranking and placement that more appropriately takes your user content into consideration while better filtering out noise from ad content.
2. Even the Americans say (from your link):
"Irregardless was popularized in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its increasingly widespread spoken use called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that "there is no such word." There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead."
That's doesn't read as accepting the 'word' beyond the most technical noting that some people use it.
We are not here concerned with so-called computer 'languages', which resemble human languages (English, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Mandarin Chinese, Twi or Shoshone etc.) in some ways but are forever totally unlike human languages in that they do not grow out of the unconscious but directly out of consciousness. Computer language rules ('grammar') are stated first and thereafter used. The 'rules' of grammar in natural human languages are used first and can be abstracted from usage and stated explicitly in words only with difficulty and never completely.
--Walter Ong [Orality And Literacy]
rel="nofollow": Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.
This means the meaning of 'nofollow' is changing? That seems a horrible idea. Previously 'nofollow' meant exactly that - "don't follow this link please googlebot", now it will mean "follow this link, but don't grant my site ranking onto the destination." - Thats a VERY different use case, I can't see all the millions of existing 'nofollow' tags being changed by site owners to any of these new tags. Surely a 'nogrant' or somesuch would be a better option, and leave 'nofollow' alone.
Sponsored is someone paided/trade for this. Treat it as distrustful.
Both is someone I don't know posted this and I made money. Treat as fake-
Consider a super-spammy site that eschews any like but a "follow", well that's weird - that may be an indication they're a spammer.
So while this (quite likely correctly) states that "nofollow" links have not search rank weight, it's not the entire story.
With an optional do-not-block attribute.
Which would be honored just like Do-Not-Track? Seems only fair.
https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relatio...
I like the change it allows them to ignore nofollow for facebook/twitter/reddit or smaller sites that nofollow all links.