Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How rel=nofollow Works

luigimontanez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 52 posts

Re: How rel=nofollow Works

#21

Post by darkane »

masklinn wrote: post #14
chalst wrote: post #3

The cited Danny Sullivan article has a little of his interview with Eric Schmidt: sullivan> I countered that Google seemed to have all the permission it needed, in that they’re not blocked from crawling pages. schmidt>“That’s your opinion,” Schmidt said, then joked: “If you could arrange a letter from Facebook and Twitter to us, that would be helpful.” sullivan> I pushed back that both have effectively given those le…

> The answer for both rel=nofollow and robots.txt is that Google has explicitly promised webmasters that it will not do this. No, not for a/@rel="nofollow", the only promise Google does is that it will not transfer pagerank credit to the link's destination[0]. This does not prevent them from using that link as an outbound in order to discover new content, nor does it prevent Google from reversing the link for the "Sh…

Where in Google's blog post do they claim to still follow the link? They provide no technical details for their process, so if we're speculating, it would make far more sense that rel=nofollow adheres to the same guidelines as a meta/robots.txt nofollow.

And this speculation for the "shared on" functionality doesn't exactly add up, either. If they're not following links with rel=nofollow, why should Google be legally or even morally responsible for storing a massive and entirely extraneous relational database, and then checking against it every time they follow a short URL from another site, just to see if it was shared on Twitter at some point?

Re: How rel=nofollow Works

#22

Post by latch »

What would happen if twitter removed rel="nofollow"? Couldn't that open the possibility for more spam on twitter? I tend to agree with Google here, but maybe when it comes to social recommendation, Twitter could be recognized as special and specific algorithms could be written to figure out the worth of a recommendation.

Re: How rel=nofollow Works

#23

Post by masklinn »

jasonlotito wrote: post #18
masklinn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answer for both rel=nofollow and robots.txt is that Google has explicitly promised webmasters that it will not do this. No, not for a/@rel="nofollow", the only promise Google does is that it will not transfer pagerank credit to the link's destination[0]. This does not prevent them from using that link as an outbound in order to discover new content, nor does it prevent Google from reversing the link for the "Sh…

> the only promise Google does is that it will not transfer pagerank credit to the link's destination Google is fairly clear about this: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38... "How does Google handle nofollowed links? In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target l…

Interesting, so their implementation has broadly expanded upon the original meaning of the attribute (and the one standardized as a microformat), and in recommending this be broadly used to fight against spam they've paved the way for an interesting time for everybody else?

Re: How rel=nofollow Works

#24

Post by shadowfiend »

masklinn wrote: post #17
luigi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that there's a difference between crawling, indexing, and ranking, but Google is pretty clear on the ultimate effect. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38... How does Google handle nofollowed links? In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from…

That's the robots nofollow, we're talking about a/@rel=nofollow which google advertises quite differently: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp... and the microformats standardization[0] stuck very carefully to "provide no additional weight or ranking to target" period . Not that crawlers can't follow that link for new content, and not that crawlers can't reverse that link for "shared on" feat…

The thing is, if Google were to say “x was shared by y on twitter”, that is precisely providing some additional weight to the result. Human weight, admittedly, though I believe this also factors into the weight on the page. So it makes sense that twitter links would also not be included in this sharing stuff either.

Re: How rel=nofollow Works

#25

Post by adeelarshad82 »

Can someone please explain to me what nofollow has to do with Google indexing or displaying tweets in their serps. It's like saying Google discourages pages which may contain relevant/important information on the topic a user may be looking for because it contains nofollow links. What am i missing here?

Re: How rel=nofollow Works

#26

Post by thadwoodman »

"The hubbub is centered around a complaint by Twitter that links shared on Twitter are not surfacing in the search results."

I think this mischaracterizes this complaint. I don't think anyone is complaining that the LINKS themselves aren't surfacing. That complaint would imply that their ought to be some influence between links on Twitter and the search rank of those linked pages. And I don't think anyone wants to see spammy tweets on Twitter altering skewing search ranking.

Rather the complaint is that recommendations from Twitter are not APPEARING in the search results. And to that point: Why is it difficult for Google to index the fact that someone linked to a site (whether it be rel=nowfollow or not)? Why does this information need to be coupled with the passing of page rank?

Re: How rel=nofollow Works

#27

Post by sjs382 »

latch wrote: post #22

What would happen if twitter removed rel="nofollow"? Couldn't that open the possibility for more spam on twitter? I tend to agree with Google here, but maybe when it comes to social recommendation, Twitter could be recognized as special and specific algorithms could be written to figure out the worth of a recommendation.

I can't imagine more spam on Twitter.

In all seriousness htough, you can probably analyze the Twitter "social graph" to weed out a lot of spam.

Re: How rel=nofollow Works

#29

Post by recoiledsnake »

What have outbound links to do with this at all? Many tweets can and do have zero links. I don't see how that's relevant to this conversation where the topic is about searching the tweets themselves, which has nothing whatsoever to do with outbound links from those tweets.

Re: How rel=nofollow Works

#30

Post by thadwoodman »

latch wrote: post #22

What would happen if twitter removed rel="nofollow"? Couldn't that open the possibility for more spam on twitter? I tend to agree with Google here, but maybe when it comes to social recommendation, Twitter could be recognized as special and specific algorithms could be written to figure out the worth of a recommendation.

I don't think anyone wants to remove the rel=nofollow attribute. I think people are confused why you can't have a social recommendation appear on a serp even if it is a rel=nofollow.
Post reply on HN