Bloggers Out There: Linking with "REL=nofollow"

Something's changed and its a good thing.

To fellow bloggers out there. This is a piece of news that I wasn't really aware of until recently when following an argument/debate on the web. Some of us have known for some time that the number of links pointing to a site increases the page rank within search engines like Google and Yahoo. It means, the more links in the web for a site, the higher the probability that that site will come up at the top of the search result when entered in the search engine.

Example in question: The argument/debate I was just referring to above. The argument was in question of the validity of a technical article that could potentially wreck havoc and crash a database, but since the publisher has not retracted the article, and the author who has refused to admit (to a certain extent) the potential danger of the article even after numerous objections by the a number of the similarly experienced personas in the community, quite a number of sites raised objections from their blogs and forums. What ensued is a huge amount of references linking to the original article, and consequently, increasing the actual article's page rank in the Google site. To the uninitiated DBA who might be searching for answers that remotely relates to this article, it is highly likely that he will stumble upon it because of its high search rankings. This could possibly cause disastrous results to the poor DBA, since search engines cannot recognize if a posted link is linked numerous times because the link was attributing to a good, or a bad thing.

In comes the piece of news I just mentioned. Google has proposed an additional attribute to the link anchor to safely ignore such links into its ranking engine. The proposal (and also in effect) suggests to add the additional attribute "REL=nofollow" within the html link to allow the webcrawlers (or whatever you call them... sorry I'm actually not sure) to safely ignore the links, and therefore reduce any unnecessary increase in search ranks. References can be found here (where I originally found about this nice piece of addition) , here and here for 1/18/2005.

This proposal was designed to reduce the number of comment spams that increasingly plague blogs these days. Having experience of getting these kinds of spams, I immediately logged on to Blogger to make sure that I can turn this option "on" for my comments, and to my pleasant surprise, it seems Blogger (being a part of the Google service, most probably) has automatically implemented this for my blog. Referring to one of the ad comments recently, I checked the source code to find out the following:

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<a href="http://www.crohns--disease.org/" rel="nofollow"> Crohn's Disease Stop Crohn's Disease</a>

A very nice addition I would say. But a last comment to those bloggers for their entries out there.. this probably only applies to comments section. When writing and linking pages where you don't want a site to get creditation, always remember to edit you html to include the "REL=nofollow", just to be safe.

We don't want to give creditation to those who don't deserve it, nudge an innocent, neophyte DBA into the wrong direction and crash an important database (maybe your banks'?) in the process.