Google PageRank and Nofollow
Nearly 3 years ago, Google released their plans to implement the rel attribute value nofollow in an attempt to combat spam on weblogs and other sites. Almost straight away, I posted my thoughts and went about hacking WordPress — which was my CMS of choice at the time — to remove any occurrence of the attribute. (In fact, the tutorial I wrote is still live at tutorialtastic.) I didn’t see how it was going to benefit blog owners or decrease the amount of spam being left, and was sure it would only penalise those loyal commenters who deserved a bit of PR in return for their input.
Although not a lot has changed — apart from a massive surge in the amount of people removing the attribute earlier this year — I do use it myself these days. Apart from a few manually activated exceptions, I still don’t apply it to comments because you guys deserve better than that. However, I do use it to control my PageRank.
As I mentioned in my last Google PR post, PageRank is assigned to pages based on the rank of links pointing to them. The higher the ranks of the links pointing in, the higher the potential PageRank of the ‘recipient’ page. This leaves us with the problem of notifying visitors about bad pages, or pages we’re not vouching for: we don’t want to give them our nice, healthy PageRank if they suck! Here is where nofollow comes in — by putting nofollow in the links we don’t want to recommend (in Pants Award recipients URLs, for example) we are effectively telling search engines not to rank their link. Some search engines even take the attribute value literally and simply don’t follow the link.
Nofollow does have its uses, and there’s no reason why other blog owners shouldn’t use it to take control. If you’re not sure how to do it, here’s an example:
At the end of the day, I wouldn’t give a person a reference if they sucked at what they do, so why do the equivalent on the Internet?
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This isn’t so much a comment on the entry (which I haven’t read, actually!) as on the styling of this red layout: the code shown there shows up in a tiny, red, monospace font, which is kind of hard to read. Maybe if you set code and pre text to have a font-size of at least 100%, or maybe even bigger than text in the containing element, to maybe 110%? Right now, having a monospace font in that size is difficult to read.
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 6:10 pm@Sarah: as I mentioned in the ‘Asides’ on my layout, I haven’t really finished fiddling so I’ll add it on my list of things to sort.
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 6:11 pmAint Google getting alot of media attention from this site. Fair point, but that is a matter of opinion on whether or not people deserve to be recognized for what they do. Some people such as yourself may think that i don’t deserve a recognition for what i do because in that field your more superior to me, but there are many people that I’m superior to so you may use “nofollow” but other people may be like this guy is awesome. I hope you see where I’m coming from as the little guy, although i am 6″ 2′ so maybe not the little guy.
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 6:33 pmAha! I’ve heard about this before on other blogging sites but I was too lazy to search for a tutorial that would help me rid myself of it, so thank you for pointing that out.
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 6:43 pmI don’t recall saying I used it because I’m superior Grant, only when ranting about something that doesn’t deserve the PR, so your logic falls down. Furthermore, I specifically said I don’t use it on comments, so you’re getting whatever benefit there is from adding your opinion, ‘little guy’ or not. If you bought a product from a website and that product ended up totally crap and not what you expected, would you rant about the website? If yes, would you do it with a normal link (thus potentially raising their rank and exposure) or would you minimise the benefit they’re getting from you by using nofollow? Sounds to me the sane option would be to use nofollow, don’t you agree? @Amber: Don’t use my old tutorial, it won’t work on newer versions! You can get plugins for it these days..
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 6:46 pmGrant, I don’t think Jem means anybody ‘less superior’ then herself, I think she is referring to those who steal, create e-drama and generally don’t deserve the link. Think of the link as a little present: her site ranks quite well and she probably only wants to give out the little presents to those who, in her opinion, deserve it.
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 6:46 pmPlease link to me and help get my pagerank back up to 4. * shameless promo * Wouldn’t it be good if you could have “optional” nofollow on your comments?
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 6:54 pmooh Jem we must have submitted the comment at the same time, lol
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 6:55 pmWell i didn’t mean she actually thought that i meant in general people could, but jem just said in a comment that if the site doesn’t deserve the attention would you give it. Well no i wouldn’t. But other people might is what i meant because they think the site is ok.
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 7:31 pmThere is a plugin to get ride of the nofollow rel attribute. It’s called dofollow, I think.
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 7:59 pm[quote] Well i didn’t mean she actually thought that i meant in general people could, but jem just said in a comment that if the site doesn’t deserve the attention would you give it. Well no i wouldn’t. But other people might is what i meant because they think the site is ok. [/quote] @ grant… whaaa? sh
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 8:01 pmthe sh is a typo… oops. sorry!
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 8:03 pmROFL Sorry I’m back now i had to get up of the floor I cant type or make sense of my self for that matter ok so basically this is what i meant, jem may not think that link is worth the link juice but others might, she said why should they gain PR if i was “chatting shit” (as i would say) about it, well it deserves that pr i think because you are linking and i cant be bothered explaining any more, aw F’It haha What Google says goes!
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 10:22 pmNever thought of it that way actually. I had removed nofollow for commenters previously, but now I’m using a plugin that only removes nofollow for commenters that leave at least 10 (configurable - I set mine to 5) comments, that way people aren’t just leaving pointless comments to get PR. Thanks for making sense to me in such a simple post.
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 10:34 pmI’m still confused by your point Grant. If Jem adds nofollow to a link it doesn’t stop that site getting a good google page rank ever, it just stops her popular site giving their site anymore popularity. I’d say it would have a similar effect to Jem stripping the URL links out of comments: i.e. just your name not your link - so that nobody could visit your site. It stops google linking her site to theirs… see?
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 11:11 pmAh i get you! i think i confused myself n there somewhere as well. ROFL
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 11:14 pmhas anyone else noticed 10posts this month and its the 8th of the month, that amazing! Also this is probably the longest blog i have followed! Deserves a medal! only i don’t have on so please do a search on Google images and give yourself one, your choice, anyone! i love rambling on making no sense on this site, its an addiction i commonly have!
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 11:16 pmyes Grant, we had noticed..
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 11:28 pm^ lol
Response posted: November 8th, 2007 at 11:40 pmI don’t know if you already mentioned this some where, but I’m not seeing it–what font did you use for the main header/links up top? Thanks
Response posted: November 9th, 2007 at 1:15 amIt seems everyone is complaining about a drop in pagerank. Mine dropped from 5 to 3, but the traffic to my site has increased since then. Most referrals are from Google. Could it be that Google have recalibrated their pagerank scale, to leave room for the best sites to rise in the future? As for nofollow, I see it as a distinction between pages I personally recommend and those I don’t. If someone posts a comment, that isn’t my personal recommendation that others should visit their site, even if I later find it interesting!
Response posted: November 9th, 2007 at 11:52 amI hadn’t thought of that, what a great idea! Hurray!
Response posted: November 9th, 2007 at 11:56 amA Wordpress plugin to turn nofollow on and off on the fly would be useful. Not sure how you’d do it though. Perhaps a mod for TinyMCE to allow you to set the rel attribute for a link would be better? That would be a good use of your ninja php skills (hint, hint, nudge, nudge).
Response posted: January 22nd, 2008 at 3:56 pm