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Tuesday, January 25, 2005

More Google AdSense Weirdness

It had to happen: even more weird Google ads.

Winer on Nofollow

Dave Winer in Scripting News writes (emphasis mine):

“Talking with Rogers Cadenhead last night, he told me that the SEO community is abuzz over the rel="nofollow” attribute. It’s going to make a bunch of people some money, it turns out, due to a quirk in how Google page-rank works. Here’s the deal. If a page on my site has 100 pointers, every pointer gives a certain amount of juice to the things it points at. However if the same page has only 3 pointers, then each pointer gives considerably more. Same if I change all but 3 of the 100 pointers to rel="nofollow” (or so the SEOers assume). Naturally they will change every pointer but the ones that point to their own pages to rel="nofollow”. Certainly an unintended consequence.”

Why would it be a “quirk” though? If every link on a page would have the same weight, now that would be a quirk. People could spew out thousands of links once they achieved a high-ranking page, and manage to create a network of thousands of well-ranking pages... which would equal near-infinite Google power.

By the way, I’m using “nofollow” on this blog, but only for links to a specific reply-form. I’m not using it for any links posted in the forum, as I want those to be fully indexed.

I’m sure many who’d consider themselves close to or part of the SEO community will spend much more thoughts on where “nofollow” is appropriate, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of blog users who do not have full control over their blog software (like those at Blogspot.com), but who now have to live with the consequences of this Google-initiative.

Today, I posted a comment somewhere, and I left a URL to a related article here. After posting I was curious... would there be a “nofollow” already? And there was, and somehow, this left a bad aftertaste. If I’m taking time to link to relevant content, isn’t it just greedy not to respect this as a real and meaningful link? And could it be Google with their “nofollow” started destroying linking mechanisms which made it good in the first place?

Google Video Alternatives

Google Video is not the only search engine somehow tapping the world of moving images. Gary Price of the Search Engine Watch Blog compiled an extensive list of alternatives.

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