vrypan — panayotis vryonis
My blog is a digital scrapbook of ideas, thoughts and personal events. My home is vrypan.net.
Home — Archive: All · English · Greek — RSS Feeds: full feed · other options
#alexa #g-metrics #google #search-engines #web-devel #web-services #yahoo #en

Why nofollow is useful

There has been a lot of talking about whether rel="nofollow" is good or bad, useful or usless (check Bitflux Blog :: Why nofollow is useless )

However I think that nofollow is quite useful for a different reason than preventing spam: preventing search engine results shown on "third party" websites mislead the search engines themselves.

Here is what I mean: Take for example g-metrics.com. Most of the pages of this site display results (actually the top-10 results) returned by google for specific queries. To do this, g-metrics.com makes use of Google Web APIs. So when google indexes one of these pages, it would increase the pagerank (or whatever ranking system a search engine is using) of a URL just because it had high enough pagerank to show up in the top 10 results...

However, using rel="nofollow" can prevent this. (I have started using nofollow in g-metrics as soon as I read about it).

Similar cases could become a big problem for search engines, as similar APIs become more popular (Google, Technorati, del.icio.us, Amazon/Alexa, etc...) The way I see it, similar services may oblige or encourage developers to use nofollow when presenting "their" results.

Share this post:
The Letter is a newsletter I send out whenever I have something to say or share. It may take a few days, weeks or months for the next one.
Privacy: I hate spam as much as you do, maybe more. I will not share your email with advertisers, etc.