[wp-hackers] OT: "Nofollow" Rant

[Chris Waigl]

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 02:34:37 -0500, Mark Jaquith
<mark.wordpress at txfx.net> wrote:
> Has anyone been able to give a reason why giving links rel="nofollow"
> for a few days would be detrimental to... well... anything?
> 
> Someone brought this up earlier, and it really gives you the best of
> both worlds.  All links in comments will have rel="nofollow" at first.
> But if the comment is still there after X days, it gets removed.

>From my unscientific googling for the comment text I was spammed with:
The same text could be found in thousands of blogs, and by far most of
them looked like abandoned blogs.

Therefore I'd wager that most of the positive effect spammer URLs get
from comment spam doesn't come from the spam surviving for a few hours
or (rarely) days on a well-maintained blog, but from those that just
languish on a server somewhere.

Now pagerank isn't some sort of open protocol but a private and opaque
ranking system. If, as Matt said, it was implemented before
third-party generated content was common, then the clever solution for
google would be to adapt pagerank to the acutal structure of the web.
Because forums, blogs and wikis won't go away. Nofollow looks like a
questionable but workable solution to a problem created by google
themselves.

>From the spirit of "nofollow" on comment links, it would depend on a
particular blog whether it is fitting or not: if there is a page
ranking system at all, a blog that's a lively discussion site with lot
of good content in the comments section would certainly deserve that
the commenters' sites benefit. Less so on a blog with basically
contentless  comments. But obviously it would be asking too much of
google to distinguish between the two.

Personally, I don't have any beef with WP making nofollow the default
in the comment links. But since I maintain my sites, I'd turn it off,
and would like to have an option for that.

-- 

Chris Waigl 
blog: http://serendipity.lascribe.net/ 
experiments: http://chrysalidesque.f2o.org