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RE: Nofollow

Brian [PersonRank 0]

Tuesday, January 25, 2005
19 years ago

Hey Philipp. I just want to say a quick thing about nofollow in reply to "And could it be Google with their "nofollow" started destroying linking mechanisms which made it good in the first place?"

It's all about choice! You should have the power to do or not to do this on your own blog. If you're posting comments on someone elses blog, your have to follow their rules, so they are the ones who are empowered (the publishers) with choice!

Google is all about giving us choices. But i'm a biased zealot so ignore me =)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

19 years ago #

Brian, I get your point, and I think it's true for some people – you and me, for example. We have additional choice, and I'm grateful for that. But most people just rely on whatever blog software is around, so they didn't have a choice. Which was sort of the point, because this just works large scale.

And even though some people say there are clever mechanisms – only a friend's comment will get the "nofollow" removed – I get the gut-feeling this is leading in the wrong direction, and is already being misused. Basically, I don't understand why my comment link I posted today isn't supposed to "count", in whatever way a tool feel it should make it count (it's not even about PageRank, it may be about several things – e.g. "theming" a page, or creating a network of "sibling" sites.)

I will see how the "nofollow" thing goes, and stay open. It's quite possible I see only the bad things, because comment spam never was a problem for me. In this forum I delete many more posts which aren't even spam, they are just asking for G|v|ail, they are garbled "test posts", or strange "i like you" posts. Yes, I have been attacked by spammers, but I quickly put their domains on an internal blacklist and it wasn't that big a deal. But it's still true everyone has to moderate their forum, so that's still a manual process. But hey, we wait and see and if it does a lot of good to fighting comment spam, maybe it's worth all the minor downsides.

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