Paid Links and the Church of rel=nofollow
Posted by Melanie Phung on Saturday, December 24, 2005 at 10:49 am
The story broke earlier this month that Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny sells links on his personal blog without using nofollow attributes. Matt Cutts of Google, on the other hand, has for month been championing nofollow tags on all paid links.
The story that’s playing out is that Zawodny was “caught” doing this, as if underhandedly, with bad intentions, polluting the sacred ground that is the World Wide Web. But it’s not like he pulled a Wordpress stunt by hiding the ads.
At issue, to simplify it for those of you who don’t know, is that the current generation of search engines, starting with the invention of Google, count links to a site as “votes” of sorts in their algorithm and that paid links are basically fake votes. A while back, at the urging of the industry, the engines said they’d obey a “nofollow” tag, which webmasters can apply to an entire page or just one link at a time. Those links would then not be weighted in the PageRank (or equivalent) calculaton. Hence the call to put nofollow tags on “unnatural” links.
Just to be contrarian and for the sake of debate: I find it strange that Google’s algorithm is now dictating how the Web should be structured. Paid ad links existed long before any algorithms were created that factored them in.
I guess I just don’t see how it’s my responsibility to keep search engine results relevant (by their definition) by catering to their algorithms - that’s their job. If they think advertising shouldn’t count as part of their equations - well bully for them. Advertising goes way back - it’s part of how commerce work. And the Internet, like nearly everything else, is governed by economics. If the engines don’t like paid links, they should, can, and for the most part have, figured out ways to discount those links.
Basically what we have is a great example of the tragedy of the commons. And I’m just not inclined to blame the individual herder for adding more cattle to the field as long as there aren’t any rules against it. And for now at least, there aren’t. As easy as it is to forget these days: Google is not the Web.
Get background on this nofollow debate. Check it out, even if only for the Link Condom parody site.
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