The first time the major engines collaborated, it was to introduce the rel=nofollow tag to combat comment spam on blogs. Comment spam where anyone can add a link in the comment section of blogs was getting to the point, where it was almost impossible o administer a blog without spending hours deleting unrelated comments usually about Viagra, gambling or ‘reviews’ about the adult industry. When some blogging platforms introduced the trackback feature, where a post would automatically link back to a site linking to it, you could spam by remote.
The no=follow tag was soon introduced – and most blogging platforms adopted it. All links added in the comment section would have the tag automatically added letting the search engines know, the link was not added by the author of the blog. This could allow search engines to ignore the link and stop it from interfering with the link calculation. Soon, he tag was adopted by many SEO and site owners as away of stopping PageRank leak (Yep, many still worry about this) and more recently Matt Cutts, even asked link sellers to adopt it to prevent the wrath of Google.
All seemed well, until people started to notice that links tagged with the rel=nofollow could still pass anchor text, and may be a bit of PageRank, the effects were supposedly minor – but definitely some value, providing you could scale it up.
In a recent post on Dave Naylor’s blog, Matt Cutts says Google has fixed it. Hope this time it’s for real. The real impact won’t be immediately seen, but as the effects propagate across the net, I’m sure there’ll be many sites in link networks effected by the knock-on effects of this fix.
I’d prefer they didn’t completely ignore rel=nofollow links, but use other qualitative factors to determine, if some value should be passed on.
