There’s a bunch of folk moaning about the implementation of the rel=”nofollow” attribute on the NoNoFollow site. They argue that for standards and other reasons the rel=”nofollow” is a bad idea.
Seems to me these folk are being very conservative, in their thinking.
These convervatives seem to be a bit stuck on the idea that a link from one page to another is something sacred, that the web will never change, that page rank is some gift of god or something. Grow up.
In my reality, page rank is something that the search engines developed for themselves in secret and change at will to make their searches perform the way they want them to.
I say that any extra information we can add to a link is a good thing. The more (optional) stuff we can add to a link to indicate the intent of the author of the link the better. This gives more traction for the search engines.
Also, we have to do something. If we just left page rank and links as they were, we would slowly fill up the web with page-rank-seeking spam. And then the value of all links would be diminished until links become mostly useless. Then we’d have to start again with a new linking system and come up with something nofollow-like.
Scoble had a good go at answering the 13 reasons against nofollow. What he said. Let’s not be conservative about this. Let’s change things. Let’s experiment.
This reminds me of the ‘bad metadata’ article you linked to a while back. The more metadata we can stick into the web the better – but perhaps this is a good time to get stuck into thinking about how it can be exploited as well.