Following Up On noFollow
...what follows may surprise you — and maybe even Google, too!
In case you've been vacationing somewhere on another planet, we should let you know that there was an extension to HTML proposed and adopted during your absence. Pretty fast, eh? ...yeah, maybe too fast – because the effect it will have on future rankings will be significant.
Original Sin
A very popular—way too popular—strategy for acquiring a bunch of links in a hurry has been to automate the posting of totally off-topic comments to blogs. Any blog'll do: some guy's family photos, a vacation diary, political and social commentary sites – you name it. They're all being used to place a comment that contains a link to an ecommerce site.
What a deal. Put your keywords in the links and you get both great Link Reputation and some PageRank feed from the myriad blog pages. With many thousands of blogs to chose from, and many of them allowing anonymous comments, it's pretty easy to get a site ranked. That's provided your interests are entirely self-serving and without regard for the quality of the host's blog site.
Of course, if the blogger wants to, he or she can spend 15 to 30 minutes every single day deleting comment spam. Even then, it's likely that Google will visit and spider the comments faster than the (only human) blogger can removed them. So, the link-spammer wins anyway.
As you probably know, Google lives and breathes on links. And blogs have become such a prevalent and link-heavy phenomenon that Google has been forced to recognize link-spam within blogs as a problem worth solving.
Frankly, we agree. What we are wondering is whether Google will find the unintended consequences all that agreeable.
The Miracle Cure?
In Google's reality, what's needed is a link for humans that is not a link for Google. So, Google proposed adding an attribute to link tags that tells their googlebot and the other search engine spiders to...
