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.

Scoble gives more info on the rel=”nofollow” standard and how the search engine & blog tools folk are moving quickly and working together to implement it:

Thanks Google (and MSN and Yahoo).

Oh, and, did anyone notice how Google got its competitors to do something without needing to get a standards committee involved? All within hours?

Hmm, why doesn’t everything in the industry work like this?

This is a win all around. It slows down the spammers, allows bloggers and others to point to things without increasing page rank. And that is like having another kind of pointing.

Here’s the next step: Let’s have an attribute where we can give a qualitative or quantitative description of how much whuffie we want to give or not give to a link. A bit more work in the search engine, but not much. I’d like something like that to have more than one dimension and I’d love to see it qualitative, emotional even. How about an attribute like rel=”opinion:good but too expensive” or rel=”opinion:i love it” or more boringly: rel=”opinion:5/10″ (half good) or: rel=”opinion:-5/10″ (half bad). I like using words to describe this stuff, other wise you need to come up with multi-dimensional measurements. Maybe google would even let us write python expressions as opinions.

But really, the idea is to make sure that we can give our feelings about a link. This helps humanize the web even more. And the search engines will need these sort of clues to make the web smarter, easier to use and more human. How about it?

Google has just implemented something new that is really going to stop comment spam:

Any link with a rel=”nofollow” attribute included will not be used in page rank calculations. So adding this attribute to any hyperlinks given in blog comments will stop the comment spammers because they won’t get page rank from it any more.

Hooray. SixApart has already announced support for MovableType and TypePad and say support for LiveJournal is coming soon.

No word about WordPress yet. I’m sure we’ll see something in the next 24 hours.

Wonderful news. The comment spam has really been getting me down.

thanks Joi