OK, now, I know you’ve all seen the rel=“nofollow” thing that Google and others are doing. I also know that you’re all unsure whether to use it or not because you haven’t heard the Word of Stuart on this new development. I’m sorry if you’ve been panickedly refreshing the front page waiting for me to pronounce the truth, but I’ve been ill. Anyway. There have been many comments on the feature, not least of which the amazing stream-of-consciousness thing from Phil which probably covers everything you need to know somewhere in its vast, unexplored, Stygian depths. Lots of people don’t like it, for all the same reasons that I don’t like it: it can only hurt the web. Spammers don’t give a shit about it, and everyne who blindly implements it removes a valuable source of linking information. People who don’t blindly implement it will be “approving” a comment to remove its nofollows, and if you’re going to do that then you might as well just leave it and “approve” a comment to put the links in at all. Pants, I say. Anyway, I shall not be implementing it; it’s nice to see that people can co-operate, but this is not something fo which there is any kind of magic bullet fix, even if everyone likes the bullet. Mark Pilgrim’s explained that in the past. The serpent is now in the Garden of Eden. All we can do is be diligent. If it’s hard for you to remove comment spam, get a better weblogging system…
And this is Nofollow, written , and concerning Rants, Web
Comments
Helen
sil
Helen: I entirely agree. This is an example of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. In this case “gold” is actually power and influence. Google’s “don’t be evil” policy should mean that they won’t use this influence for bad things, but then again the Google Watch guy probably feels differently.
I think it’s interesting seeing that Google are now influential enough to make their own “standards“.
It’ll be interesting to watch what this mean for web technology in the next few years.