rel="nofollow" - the debacle.

Firstly, a quick explanation. The rel="nofollow" tag was agreed upon to prevent comment SPAM. Basically, people were using robots to add comments to blogs & guestbooks merely to get a backlink. This is simply a means to try and manipulate the search engine algorythms and gain higher search engine position. I agree that that's a bad thing. Blogger (as an example) now adds the rel="nofollow" tag to any links a comment has. The upshot is that when Googlebot spiders a blog, it ignores (or, to be precise does not "follow") any links in comments.

I don't agree with the rel="nofollow" tag as an answer to the problem. It's a shotgun approach that has only introduced more problems. The main reasons I don't like it is that 1) it won't stop comment SPAM and 2) it's open for outrageous abuse.

The core of the issue is blogs (or gusetbooks) with high PR (Google pagerank) were tagetted by spammers as a great place to have a link from. The rel="nofollow" tag allows people to not have to moderate comments on their blogs/guestbooks safe in the knowledge that they are never going to provide a "worthwhile" backlink to any visiting spambots.

This is a bunch of crap. If Google is serious about comment SPAM they should de-index the unmoderated blogs & guestbooks. If you aren't reading (and therefore moderating) the comments left on your blog, you don't really need comments at all as they obviously don't interest you.

On the sinister side, the rel="nofollow" tag can be abused, and this is starting to happen. Wikipedia.org now applies the attribute to all outbound links. So, while it has millions of sites linking in to it, it (effectively) no longer links out to any sites. Thats a case of take and not give on a monumental scale. This tag is also being abused by directories. Directories should obviously provide a backlink to the site that has been submitted to them - the submitter has taken the time & effort to submit their website and the payback should be a backlink. They've provided the directory with keyword rich content after all, which is exactly what they want to gain better search engine placement.

To summarise, rel="nofollow" is NOT the answer. The answer to the problem is to de-index sites that cannot be bothered to moderate the content that they link out to. Wikipedia being a fine example.

James enjoys rowing ;)

OK, the template finally looks the way I want it - a fixed border & menu Windows Media Player 11 style. Whether you love or hate WMP (I've got my gripes with it and use DIVX player more often) I doubt many people would argue that the new interface in version 11 isn't rather lovely.

As part of the CSS I created a container for the Adsense to keep it visible on the page when the reader is scrolling. Some people will doubtless not like this, but heck, Adsense is easy enough to swich off if you don't want to see it. I would imagine most Bloggers who have Adsense on their pages will like this little touch.

All that remains is to polish up the code a bit, and try to get it to validate then I will post the template as a text file for use with Blogger for all and sundry to download if they want it. I haven't seen many other "Vista" style layouts for Blogger around, although maybe I'm just not looking in the right places!

Feedback on the design would be nice, so please leave a comment if you have one.

***OOPS*** Breaks in IE6. Will try to sort that out!

This year we returned to the Chungdokwan National Championships. James had a gold medal from last year to defend, and Emma had decided it was time she got into the competitive side of Taekwondo.

Here's James in his Gold medal winning bout! (he's in red).



And I'm very proud to say Emma was also successful! (she's in red too)







Here "the gold"





I did have a couple of bouts myself - unfortunately my fighting obviously isn't up to the standard of my children so we won't be disscussing what the medals I came home with were. We had a great day, and I'm very proud to have two gold medalists. Looking forward to next year!