41–50 of 79 posts
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This is what HTTP redirects are for: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
That isn't very useful if you are not sysop of the site the old content links to.
I still have lots of external links on my personal website, and I still put up external links almost any time I comment on Hacker News. I write FAQ documents on a few dozen subjects that are set up with links that work by copy-and-paste into emails or on most forums that aren't programmed to actively suppress active links. (Thus those FAQ documents work fine here on Hacker News.) Links do sometimes break, and the mos…
Incidentally, most of Norvig's personal page is linked to content on Norvig.com, not to other sites.
[Edit] As a qualitative measure of how far Norvig.com is from the mean, imagine the comments it would draw as an "Show HN: Feedback" thread.
The problem with the utopian vision of the linked web is that links to meaningful content elsewhere on the web die. In November of 1994, I created a personal web page. I linked the one image (the logo of the university where I intended to go to go to grad school). By March, the link was broken. The school had redone its website. The world wide web broke the social contract implicit in Gopher. Geocities is no longer o…
Linkrot is a real problem, but it's nowhere near as harmful as PageRank was. Once links have commercial value, people don't want to give them away for free. Serious publishers quit making links to outside sites and soon other people got out of the linking habit.
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However, you can also use nofollow to link to your competitors without increasing their page rank.
Flagged for the really obnoxious "subscribe to our newsletter" pop-up (that apparently is more important than the content on the page, since it hides the content as you get a few sentences in), and, as others pointed out, for committing the same crime it's ranting about. This really smells like spam, and either way, isn't HN quality.
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That was one of the major challenges Ted Nelson's 70s/80s Xanadu project though would need to be addressed in order to produce a deployable hypertext system. It seems like they were wrong on that front: the web won out by just deploying without addressing it.
Ah, good ol' WorseIsBetter.
Revisiting my comment from a couple of weeks ago, "mass media, which includes Google, however they may try to deny it, lives by the numbers, which means adapting to the lowest common denominator. Just think, as the Internet spreads, Google will evolve (devolve) closer and closer to broadcast TV!" Just substitute "the Web" for "Google"; the Web is becoming television!!
Totally agree. But unlike traditional media, on the Web you can be a broadcaster too without any permission.
The reason the internet won't actually get as bad as TV is the lack of approvals, and relatively low cost even for good quality production. The problem is that it gets harder to find amongst all the bleep. Search engines help, but I have found some useful sites, by following links, that apparently aren't indexed by Google or DuckDuckGo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linkrot is a real problem, but it's nowhere near as harmful as PageRank was. Once links have commercial value, people don't want to give them away for free. Serious publishers quit making links to outside sites and soon other people got out of the linking habit.
This problem has been solved 7 years ago. In 2005, Google introduced nofollow : ... I believe that nofollow was mainly introduced to fight against guest book spam, so links in comments wouldn't be accounted by the PageRank algorithm, thus removing the incentive for that nasty spam. However, you can also use nofollow to link to your competitors without increasing their page rank.
in the big picture you give them data and they process it as they wish; "nofollow" is just a suggestion. for instance, they can compute metrics of it such as the ratio of follow/nofollow links pointing to a site and feed it into their scoring system
good links do get passed around in comments (this is the blog post you really should read about this) that shouldn't be nofollowed, while other webmasters are stingy and nofollow everything they link. so who knows what Google or bing does with this.
What is clear is that if you play it safe and give no link, Google won't give them any credit.
I've had an idea for an 'autolink' took for a while - it'll go through your HTML-base and generate links to other pages based on a statistical likelihood that your word is related to the other page(s).
[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/ [2] http://econlog.econlib.org/ [3] http://www.volokh.com/