The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

The modern internet age has seen the creation of lots of new ideas for what should be included in future revisions of the HTML spec and even some new attributes that were created by the big search engine companies themselves. One of those attributes is called “nofollow” and was created in 2005 by Matt Cutts. The link I just inserted to Matt’s wikipedia entry uses this new attribute which Google, Yahoo, MSN and many others all recognize now.

To use it you just put rel=”nofollow” in your hyperlink text. So that link above would look like (with the carats removed): a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Cutts” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow” Matt Cutts. /a

What this does is tells Google to not assign any pagerank attribution from that outbound link. That means that if my site had a Pagerank of 5 Google would not give any credit to wikipedia for an incoming link from a PR 5 ranked site. Instead the link may not even be indexed by Google (whether it is indexed or not is up to the individual search engine - some literally will “not follow” a nofollow link while others still follow it but just don’t do any Search Engine Ranking using it).

Nofollow was invented by Matt to help combat comment link spam, which happens a lot on blogs specifically (all comments on this blog require moderation so no comment spam makes it to the actual blog but I do have to discard spam comments quite often!). Nofollow has evolved over the last couple of years though to be used for some new uses. Within the past year, Google specifically has been advocating that nofollow now be used on all sponsored links such that no SEO (search engine optimization) is gained from links people have paid to be placed either within a blog post itself or in the sidebar. Google also basically does an automatic nofollow application to Banner ads.

The use of nofollow in this manner has generated a lot of controversy and i’ve been reading up on it some lately and there have been some interesting discussions at various paid blog posting sites. The problem stems from the fact that there does seem to be a double standard wherein Google is ok with not “nofollowing” AdSense related links but forcing any other type of sponsorhips to not contribute to Google search results and rankings (PageRank specifically). For example, some blogs that Google likes or is receiving some form of monetization from (like AdSense ads) have not been punished for not using nofollow on all of their sponsored links. Many other sites have had their pageranks reduced to 0 by Google as punishment for accepting sponsored posts or having paid links. Google views this as a violation of their quality standards and discusses SEO here.

I’m not sure if what Google and others are pushing is the right thing, but I do see that they have the right to rank people however they want. If Google wanted to make all results for ice cream point to articles about monkeys, that is well within their rights to do so. However, the point at which their results become irrelevant and ineffective is when they start losing customers (because that is really what all of us who use Google every day are - they do make billions of dollars off of advertising after all). My only complaint is that it definitely is a weighted standard where-in monetization of links is bad if Google isn’t getting a cut of the money, but ok if they do. There needs to be a fair standard or I can definitely see Google getting in trouble with anti-trust issues at some point down the road. At this point I don’t think Congress understands the search engine web-space well enough to try to regulate it (it took them 15+ years to figure out what Microsoft was doing) but at some point down the road the “series of tubes” that is the Search Engine business will be figured out and some sort of fairness controls put in.

All links in this random post have nofollow, but I highly doubt that the PageRank 10 Google (only ones who are 10 as far as I know - they trust themselves completely!) or the highly PageRanked (probably an 8 or 9 but I have no good way of verifying that) WikiPedia.Org will care either. None of the posts on my blog have been written in response to any sponsorship and that policy will continue for now.  The only form of monetization that I will use are called affiliate links (see my disclosure policy).  These are things like when I’m talking about a movie I saw I will link to the product page for that product on Amazon and if the person who clicked on the link buys a product from Amazon I receive a commission on it.  Pretty non-evil in the whole scheme of monetization I think, and well within the ever-changing landscape of rules issued by Google.  Hopefully it will keep me from being nerfed into non-existence (also known as having a PageRank of 0) .  Google controls the search world for now, but someday down the road perhaps another “do no evil” company will come along and steal their thunder, but that day is not today.

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