Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

"If you add rel=nofollow to your link markup, Google won't count the link as a sign of the site's popularity."

IMO, there is no public record of what effect rel=nofollow has or doesn't have. I'd suggest, as a baseline, that it's pretty much like wearing garlic to keep away vampires.

There are probably more honest ways to "work" the search engines, e.g., creating a good site that directly competes with the bad site, and getting people to link to the good site.

nofollow isn't a panacea, but it's one of the things worth doing, imo.

Google says that they don't count nofollow links, and I see no reason to disbelieve them. Other search engines may not care, but some search engines don't follow robot exclusion notices but those notices are still worth putting in.

I'm hoping you *meant* to say "where there are more women than men"...

Oy, through some weird Freudian error, I reversed what I meant. I've corrected it. Thx.

I still don't understand the purpose of nofollow, nor the implied concept that links are votes. If I were a white supremacist, I'd like to be able to find that site through Google.

What if the tables were turned and the masses linked to such sites only - then I couldn't find the "legit" (whatever that might mean) sites through Google.

Nick, as I suspect you know, Google counts how many times a page is linked to when assigning a relevancy ranking to it. By putting in the nofollow tag, you're telling Google not to count your page as giving the linked-to page more weight. (If I'm missing your point, I apologize preemptively.)

Yeah. Let's say a certain website's point-of-view is pervasively deprecated in our society. Does that then mean that we should not allow (through aggressive use of nofollow tags) it's being easily found via a high Google rank?

I say, let it be found and judged for what it is. The alternative is for all currently unpopular POVs to be difficult to find.

On the other hand, nofollow makes it harder for sites that have little value other than shock value to knock worthier sites down the list.

Nofollow corrects a flaw in Google's algorithms: Not every mention is a recommendation.

Google's methods for determining relevance are complex, always evolving, and never available for review under public scrutiny.

I don't think of this as a matter of believing whether nofollow effects how Google counts links.

I think of this as a matter of not assuming that we know much about how nofollow really effects Google results--and, similarly, not trying to accomplish positive things on the web based on any assuming that we know this.

David,

Thanks for the kind words and the nice write-up. The nofollow issue is interesting, indeed. In the end, it's hard to imagine that enough folks would use it to achieve the critical mass (and contextual mass, thanks Carole) that would make any kind of meaningful difference in search results. Still, I'll be sure to insert it in my code when I do the lesson again.

Hey -- as long as you're fixing the women-men thing, maybe fix the spelling of my name to the female variety (with an "e")? :-) Also, the egregious link to the MLK site from About.com occurs at this URL: http://familyinternet.about.com/cs/martinlutherking/. Interesting that it's in their "Family Internet" area...

maybe i wanna have a try

If you want to keep from helping that page get ranked on the searches you can just tell people to “type in www dot MartinLutherKing dot org” to go to the offending site. I think most people surfing the net would understand the dot convention. Nofollows keep from conveying Page Rank (PR) but don’t keep from somewhat helping the linked sites placement on search results. It was developed to keep a commenter from putting in a link in a highly ranked page to get page rank from that site. Blogging software automatically adds nofollow tags to links like area rugs to keep them from getting PR. It would also help if you always added a link to a legitimate and competing site. That might help push the offending site down on the search results page if you can get the legit page over it. I understand the concept of freedom of speech here and would not suggest that anyone try to keep unpopular points of view off the web but I am not sure they need your help either.