Martin G Brown came by my site for a visit and asked:
There is a flip side to this rel="nofollow" attribute.
This is that genuine commenters will not make their way up the google rankings either.
If someone goes to the trouble of comenting about your post, don't you owe it to them to help them up the rankings a bit?
Well Martin you are absolutely right - genuine commenters will not rise up the google rank by posting comments on people's blogs. But, to answer your question: No - I don't owe commenters a bump in page rank just because they went 'to the trouble' of commenting.
I find this sort of thinking to be a general problem in the world today. People feel that the world owes them something every time they do the simplest things. People used to do things out of common courtacy. Now many people expect a reward for being decent. It is as if being a kind, considerate, friendly person is such a burden, that if one does decide to exhibit these traits they damn well better get a prize for it.
Sorry - I won't organize a parade in your honour because you held the door open for me. I won't nominate you for person of the year because you covered your mouth when you sneezed. I won't hand out trophies to people that let me merge into their lane during rush hour. The most anyone will get from me is the most they should realistically expect: A genuine "thank you," "bless you," or courtacy wave respectively.
So Martin, thank you for your comment. At the time of this post I have not yet implemented rel='nofollow' on this site so you may still be getting a bump from me. Eventually, when I do implement the feature the bump will end. But, there will still be a link from my site to yours telling the world that Martin Brown appears to be a friendly VB.net Programmer from somewhere in the ether. Why not vist his site.
andre
Posted by andre at January 29, 2005 11:03 PMO.K. maybe the phrase “owe it” was a little strong, and I certainly wont be checking for rel=”nofollow” before comenting.
Although this measure will reduce blog-spam, I don’t believe that it will stop it as much as you think.
The ultimate motive is for the spammer to get people looking at their site. This means that having a link on your site is still very useful to them even if it doesn’t improve their ratings. This is why people will pay good money for “Ads by Google” on your site.
You only have to look at the news groups to see this. Most groups don’t contribute to rankings already, but they still have a spam problem.
Personally, I think this is a trick (the type everyone accuses Microsoft of) by Google to try to correct a flaw in their ranking algorithm that makes them bias towards blogs.
I agree with Andre wholeheartedly on his little well placed rant on "owing you a bump in your rankings." Before PageRank existed people commented simply to be in the debate and share their thoughts. Somehow the ego-boo notion become technically intertwined with technology when Google came along. And of course ego-boo for spammers is not really anything to do with ego, it has to do with cold hard $$$.
So I implemented rel="nofollow" and I believe this will also need to be done with TrackBack links as well... The trick then is to ensure that content that is posted for "bumping" up other sites actually does what it is intended to do.
All of this I think is an evolution of the web and electronic communication in general.. We are trying to model real world interaction electronically and we simply don't have the tools yet to do so. Taking a mailing list discussion "offline" to a blog is an interesting repercussion of this... People need spaces, safe spaces, to talk and discuss even electronically but we also want wide audiences. Unfortuantely we don't yet have the electronic interaction models, roles and security methods that are well known to make this happen effectively while being economically viable.
There is nothing really wrong with unsolicited email or comment spam as long as the reader has a way to control it. Here's an idea:
Why can't a web browser be also modified so that all links with rel="nofollow" are not rendered at all, or rendered in a special gray color to indicate less importance... I think once the UI on the web enabled priority setting for links and content we'd all be much better at handling info overload.
Posted by: Alex Sirota at February 1, 2005 02:31 PM