Google: “You are either with us, or with the spammers”

22 Jan

Christopher Baus has an interesting take on the google=”nofollow” debate. He points out that bloggers do all the right things to rank high in search results. Bloggers create fresh content on a regular basis and are active participants in the blogs of others, creating a massive link structure.

For instance if you search for Russell, Russell Beatie is the number 2 result. That might not be a shock to regular tech blog readers, but I suspect if you ask an average person on the street if they knew of Russell Crow or Russell Beatie, I don’t think our favorite wireless maven would get many nods. But there is he is, number 2.

What if Google uses nofollow to determine if a web page is a blog? They could use nofollow to make your blog less relevant. If that is the case, they got the whole blogging community to agree to their plan to make themselves less relevant, by employing a tactic straight out of the Bush administration’s play book.

I’m not sure I agree with Chris but it is an interesting theory.

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2 Responses

Chuck Lawson

January 22nd, 2005 at 11:52 pm
1

Interesting take.. My own theory is that Google got a mechanism to try to keep PageRank (and their results) relevant for another year or two, and spun it as “helping out the bloggers”, rather then saving their own existence…

Comment spam is wildly swaying Google results in several different categories.

Like a lot of folks, I don’t think nofollow is going to reduce comment spam much (it may even increase it a bit to offset the loss.)

On the other hand, if Google can generate enough buzz to get nofollow made the default, particularly on some of the services full of abandoned blogs (where comment spam piles up like snowdrifts), then it won’t be affecting them nearly as much, even though we’ll still be fighting the spammers (who will come for clickthrus even if they don’t get pagerank).
John

January 23rd, 2005 at 9:12 am
2

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the “nofollow” attribute was designed to keep search results and PageRank relevant. As a side benefit it will also help bloggers who don’t know how to fight comment spam any other way. Another side benefit to bloggers is that they can use the tag selectively to keep certain links they use from getting “Google Juice”.