rel nofollow suits commerce users of Google
There were reports on the Register and Wired over a year ago suggesting that Google were thinking about taking blogs out of the search results because they were cluttering up the commercial results. No doubt they were under a great deal of pressure from commercial entities who suddenly found that they had a bucket load more competitors to race against to get a top listing - potentially costing them a lot more expenditure with Search Engine Optimisation.
Frankly if I was running a commercial site that relied so heavily on on-line search results to bring in traffic I would have been very annoyed at the way blog results have taken over the search results.
As a web user I am delighted that the playing field has been evened out and that I can find information on subjects without having a commercial edge on it. I hate having to wade through loads of results for sales when I am trying to find some information on product. It even worse when you are trying to find out some information about a place - normally you got pages full of hotels, B&Bs; and cottages.
But blogging has changed the landscape and as it has matured from simplistic 'I feel rough today' diary entries to interesting articles, eye witness writings, political analysis and heavyweight pieces so the search engine results have become more useful.
However things might be about to change again. Moveable Type and Google have got together as major blog players, Google own Blogger, with Yahoo and MSN to throw up the rel="nofollow" attribute. this is brilliant work by the industry to combat comment spam on blog sites and Moveable Type have already produced a rel-nofollow plug-in for their software.
If every one installs it it should kill comment spam off quite quickly. However at the same time it will mean that comments themselves will be reduced on all blogs because an incentive, or you could say a reward, for adding to a thread of comments has been to get a link to your site. If you take the topic further and write about it on your own blog you may well use a trackback - which will also fall foul of the nofollow rel.
This means that this whole network of links between blogs that give them such high rankings will start to crumble and the page rankings and search engine positioning will drop and the commercial sites will start to gain ground again. In some ways this is not good news for the search engines either as they may see their placed adverts revenue drop as the blog 'chaff' dissipates.
It will be interesting to see what develops over the next few months.
I have just added the MT plug in to my site and so I don't expect anyone to bother to comment here any more!
Update!
Actually what I would like in the MT Plug-in is to add the rel="nofollow" to urls in the comment but not for the commentors url. This will mean that the commenter gets credit for their contribution.
Yes this field could still get spammed but I use moderation tools such as MTBlacklist to spot and block naughty URLs.
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