{"id":91,"date":"2006-08-09T18:38:53","date_gmt":"2006-08-09T08:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/2006\/08\/09\/nofollow-good-idea-bad-name\/"},"modified":"2006-08-09T18:38:53","modified_gmt":"2006-08-09T08:38:53","slug":"nofollow-good-idea-bad-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/2006\/08\/09\/nofollow-good-idea-bad-name\/","title":{"rendered":"Nofollow: good idea, bad name"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have never understood the furore that greeted Google’s introduction of the rel=”nofollow” attribute<\/a>. It seemed to me to be a perfectly sensible way of specifying the provenance of hyperlinks on a Web page. However, many people took it to be Google’s way of penalising contributors to blogs and other interactive websites. Some even thought that Google was guilty of a blanket attack on all blogs. These accusations aren’t true, but the reasons they came up are interesting: Google gave a spurious justification for nofollow; and the name “nofollow” itself is misleading. Actually there are good reasons to use nofollow, and if it had a better name it would be more widely used and less controversial.<\/p>\n

Google’s first mistake was that they presented nofollow as an anti-spam measure. Since it obviously would do little to discourage spammers, it seemed as if Google were hiding the “real” reason. Many people noted the downward effect that nofollow would have on blog PageRank and decided that Google were trying to kill blogging. Of course, a moment’s reflection shows that the real reason for nofollow is that Google was merely trying to do what they always do: improve the quality of their search results, which ensures their reputation remains strong and they continue to make lots of money. <\/p>\n

The second mistake was more simple: the name. “nofollow” emphasises the fact that Google would not follow such links when calculating PageRank. This gives the impression that Google would not follow the links at all, and would somehow marginalise the linked websites.<\/p>\n

What nofollow really is is simply a way of identifying links that were not created by a website’s editors. Google may choose to use this information in its PageRank calculations, but that’s not the only possible use. For example, Google have said that they apply ranking penalties to websites that link to known “bad neighbourhoods”. If a spammer adds a link to his bad neighbourhood on my blog, then the link will be marked with nofollow. This may not deter the spammer, but it will prevent Google from penalising me for linking to that bad neighbourhood.<\/p>\n

Another example is that a website backend or fancy CSS could present nofollow links in a special colour, serving to show that they were not created by the website editors, but instead contributed by a reader. This gives a clue to what might be a better name for nofollow.<\/p>\n

“Contrib” would be a good name for the attribute. The meaning is clear: a link with rel=”contrib” was contributed to the website by an external party. The abbreviation “contrib” also has a long history of use in computing, so it has the weight of tradition behind it. Unfortunately the people at Google, who probably spent many weeks or months fine-tuning their algorithms to handle their new attribute, seem only to have spent about two minutes deciding what to call it. Names are powerful things, and bad names are just as powerful as good ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have never understood the furore that greeted Google’s introduction of the rel=”nofollow” attribute. It seemed to me to be a perfectly sensible way of specifying the provenance of hyperlinks on a Web page. However, many people took it to be Google’s way of penalising contributors to blogs and other interactive websites. Some even thought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-web-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}