On the other hand, how about being deliberately deceptive, and actually publishing the fact that you are for the world to see? Now they probably aren’t alone of course, but since I’ve spotted it may as well name and shame:

chainreactioncycles{dot}com (can’t put a link – keep reading….)

They have an alluring “Exchange links with us!” page. There’s a load of gumpf about how echanging links with them will benefit your site. They’ll even pop your link on their homepage for a day or so. Sounds great! But wait….what’s that in the header of your “Partner Links” page. Some appears to have mistakenly added an extra meta tag:

<meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW” />

Hmmmm – it’s also mistakenly been pasted into the headers of all the other link pages – the ones listing the 800 or so gullible webmasters who fell for this. I just love the way the noindex and nofollow are in all caps to – maybe they are really hoping that’ll make sure Google knows how little these guys think of their llink partners.

On the off chance you don’t know what this meta tag means:

NOINDEX – they are telling the search engines NOT include these pages in their results.

NOFOLLOW – they are telling the search engines they do not vouch for the quality of the sites they are linking to. That’s a bit rich since their “exchange links page” states they check your site to see that it meets their guidlines – I mean, are they doing that or not, and if so, why the nofollow?

They do, it seems, put their newest “partners” on the homepage, but they seem to habve missed out the NOINDEX meta tag. Not to worry, they found a solution to that by cloaking the link with redirects. Fiendishly inventive.

Honestly, this whole “hoard your PageRank” and ongoing battle to trick other webmasters in to thinking they are getting something when they are not is really cheesing me off. The blame has to lie at Google’s feet as they started this whole nofollow nonesense. The initial idea was sound enough – the tag should be used for UGC and I agree with that. I don’t, however agree that it should become a tool for webmasters to manipulate their ranking in the search engines and I’m pretty sure it’s intention was to try and put a stop to that anyway. The most laughable example of course is Wikipedia “nofollowing” the links to their sources. Shame on you Google.

Footnote: chainreactioncycles may well be, in all other ways, a reputable company selling quality kit to lots of satisfied customers. I have no experience with which to comment on that though.

I just watched the SEOMOZ whiteboard Friday video on nofollow and PageRank sculpting, but didn’t leave it with any conclusions. The answer seems to be in Matt Cutt’s announcement, and this is how I read it:

Google does not like people messing with PageRank and is telling webmasters to stop trying it.

That being the case, as far as I’m concerned stop using nofollows (or any alternative methods) on internal links. You’re giving Google a negative indicator, ie that you don’t vouch for your own content. That can’t be good. To think as a webmaster you can funnel PageRank using another method without Google noticing is probably foolhardy, and certainly arrogant. So I’m not looking into it.

What saddens me about nofollow is it’s abuse – particularly WikiPedia (and other large sites – Wiki is just the top example). WikiPedias’ content is moderated and the external links have not been paid for so the use of nofollow is not in line with Google’s (or other engines) advice on what exactly the tag is for.

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.