Matt Cutts Talks About Rel=Nofollow

Matt Cutts In Favor of Using Rel=Nofollow on Untrusted Links & Talks About How It Should Also be Used for Sites Such as Wikis
He endorses the use of rel=nofollow tags on links that are posted by users. The idea is to cut down on linkspam.
For his own blog, he moderates comments to ensure that any comments/links that are posted are validated first. He notes that developers producing software for linkspamming are smart enough to avoid the effort if they know a certain application rel=nofollow's external links - this can be a deterrent for large scale applications.
He also recommends its use on Wikis since linkspam is an active and growing concern.He gives a basis evaluation of how to use it effectively with forums (see below).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

In an ideal world, nofollow would only be for untrusted links. Let’s take the example of a forum that wants to avoid linking to spam, but the same advice applies to wikis or any other web software. If an off-domain link is made by an anonymous or unauthenticated user, I’d use nofollow on that link. Once a user has done a certain number of posts/edits, or has been around for long enough to build up trust, then those nofollows could be removed and the links could be trusted. Anytime you have a user that you’d trust, there’s no need to use nofollow links.




My question. Do you think its likely that now, or in the future, too many outgoing links without the rel=nofollow command could negatively affect a site PageRank - or the rumored Trustrank?

what is "Trustrank" ?

never seen that one

thx.

Aaron Wall, author os the SEO BOOK (http://www.seobook.com/rf/idevaffiliate.php?id=378_0_1_3) said this about TrustRank....



A buddy of mine pointed me to a white paper by Zoltan Gyongyi, Hector Garcia-Molina, & Jan Pederson about a concept called TrustRank (http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF)(PDF).

Human editors help search engines combat search engine spam, but reviewing all content is impractical. TrustRank places a core vote of trust on a seed set of reviewed sites to help search engines identify pages that would be considered useful from pages that would be considered spam. This trust is attenuated to other sites through links from the seed sites.


TrustRank can be use to

automatically boost pages that have a high probablility of being good, as well as demote the rankings of pages that have a high probability of being bad.
help search engines identify what pages should be good canidates for quality review

Some common ideas that TrustRank is based upon:

Good pages rarely link to bad ones. Bad pages often link to good ones in an attempt to improve hub scores.
The care with which people add links to a page is often inversely proportional to the number of links on the page.
Trust score is attenuated as it passes from site to site.
To select seed sites they looked for sites which link to many other sites. DMOZ clones and other similar sites created many non useful seed sites.

Sites which were not listed in any of the major directories were removed from the seed set, of the remaining sites only sites which were backed by government, educational, or corporate bodies were accepted as seed sites.

When deciding what sites to review it is mostly important to identify high PR spam sites since they will be more likely to show in the results and because it would be too expensive to closely monitor the tail.

TrustRank can be bolted onto PageRank to significantly improve search relevancy.



http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/images/468-60.gif (http://www.seobook.com/rf/idevaffiliate.php?id=378_0_1_3)

At the risk of seeming grossly naive, may I please ask the following questions on this topic?

1. If a site contains good content, useful to many people, why is it apparently not enough to allow that site to stand alone without efforts being made to SEO or link it to others?

2. This nofollow business (if I am ever able to actually do it); what is its purpose? I realise that it's another search engine thing, presumably ensuring that a search does not follow a link to elsewhere, but why is such a command inserted?

Honestly, I don't understand what this is all about. I would have thought that putting a site out there is something which either attracts the desired attention or it does not. Of course, this attitude just may explain why I have thousands of hits but few members. But should I really care to the extent that I set about SEO activity, nofollow commands, etcetera?

Biggles LLB :confused:

Biggles LLB those factors only have importance if you are trying to rank in the organic serps.

Let me show you what Link Spam can do....

Search Google for Miserable Failure (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=HPIA,HPIA:2006-05,HPIA:en&q=miserable+failure) -- Whats the First result?

When Google announced this command, they posted this on their BLOG (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html)


If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Forums would be considered 'public areas'. Yahoo and MSN have also agreed to follow this conditional.

The attribute is called "nofollow" with rel="nofollow" being the format inserted within an anchor tag. When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner.
For example, this is how the HTML markup for an ordinary link might look:
<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html">Visit My Page</a>
This is how the link would look after the nofollow attribute has been added, with the attribute portion shown in bold

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

Thanks Joey and Loco.M

I am beginning to get the picture. Poor old Bush, eh? How embarrassing for him. :rolleyes:

OK now, given that my site is primarily a public information/protest site and I really don't care whether it ever becomes 'commercial' (be nice to get costs back of course), I take it that it matters very little whether or not I go for SEO?

The information on what I can do to set up a nofollow on links (thanks Joey) is apparently valuable in ensuring that my site is not listed as a spammer.

Would I be right to think, then, that provided my site content is of a high standard, relevant to the meta keywords set up there, AND is not abused by links to other sites of, shall we be polite and say 'lower standards', then my site will rank naturally on any search engine for what it actually is?

If so, I am happy. If not, maybe I should start reading the SEO forum more closely to see what tips I can glean there. I really don't want to get into learning much more than is necessary to make my site seen as one of high quality content. I am far too old and decrepit to become a millionaire now - it would KILL me! Hope my wife doesn't win lotto in the near future or we may have to give it all away. :eek: :) :D

Cheers guys. Very helpful - as usual.

Biggles LLB

Would I be right to think, then, that provided my site content is of a high standard, relevant to the meta keywords set up there, AND is not abused by links to other sites of, shall we be polite and say 'lower standards', then my site will rank naturally on any search engine for what it actually is?


Its a little more complicated then that. None of us knows the specifics for certain. Google give hints at best. But, in a nutshell, it comes down to a few broad topics. Quality website content and design, and quality linking in and out of your site. Those are the 2 main factors.

Google's algorithm relies on more then 100 individual factors. So its very hard to give you a soup receipe as to how to rank well. But those are the basics.

No sympathy for Bush here ;)

nor for nofollow (http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/blog/nofollow-nonsense/251/). You want people to participate on your site? then have the infrastructure in place to delete the spam, moderate and manage.

I've removed nofollow from my blog - it did nothing to abate the flow of spam from professional spammers in third world countries - I know, I've traced the IPs enough to see the pattern. I see no point in penalising the genuine commenter or forum poster, nor the occassional over enthusiastic link dropper.

Sarah

I have applied the nofollow attribut on my forums using a popular vB hack. It was applied 10 days ago. I will wait about 4-5 months and than let's see what impact does this make to my forum ranking.

You want people to participate on your site? then have the infrastructure in place to delete the spam, moderate and manage.


On anything like this, you have to consider that the vast majority of forums are NOT webmaster related.

For example, Members on my several car forums could care less about PageRank or link building. They wouldnt even know about the nofollow in most cases, and having nofollows wouldnt stop them from using the forum.

Webmaster sites are different.

Even on the webmaster forums, I don't think people are going to check the source code to check if forum is using nofollow or not.

No sympathy for Bush here ;) None here either Sarah. Just the English way of being sarcastic. We have a slightly different sense of humour to the Americans (and Kiwis it would seem). For the record, I believe Bush is 'not the sharpest pencil in the box' and a mere puppet of Big Business World Inc. And as much of a grinning moron as our own PM.

nor for nofollow (http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/blog/nofollow-nonsense/251/). You want people to participate on your site? then have the infrastructure in place to delete the spam, moderate and manage.I am trying to do just that, Sarahk, but as Joey rightly says above it really is a matter of horses for courses, don't you think? Depends on what the object of your site is. I didn't start mine knowing anything abour SEO or spiders or search engines. Just wanted to put something 'out there' for the record and do a little shit-stirring to jockey up one or two peeps. As a matter of interest (acknowledging that you might not be interested) my little site, started only in March 2006, is headed for some 400,000 hits this month from more than 20 different countries. This despite the fact that I have not a clue what I'm doing. I realise this is no big deal but it is not too bad for a 59 year-old with no real IT experience to speak of. Perhaps a little more knowledge could make me downright dangerous??? :D

hey hey hey... dont start on politics y'all ;)

Even on the webmaster forums, I don't think people are going to check the source code to check if forum is using nofollow or not.And that sadly includes the spammers. So regardless of topic you still need your community to report and moderate the bad stuff. I can point to forums where they've been allowed in and turned the forum to crap.

Nofollow is failing because it's not deterring the spammers.

Totally agree, Sarah.

Rule #1: Don't implement something designed to punish the bad guys if it can also punish the good guys and in fact does nothing to stop the bad guys.

Rule #2: Stop worrying so much about linking out and focus more on linking in.

Rule #3: If you nofollow my link, how likely do you think I am going to be to link to you? You're just pissing off potential organic backlinks.

Rule #4: Never underestimate people. Even if the majority won't think to check no-guest links or nofollow links, sooner or later someone will. And when it comes out that you have been quietly doing that, how pissed do you think the people that thought they had a trusting realtionship with you, the site owner, are going to be? Remember what happened at the old vBulletin forum? And on several other forums around that same time?

...Remember what happened at the old vBulletin forum? And on several other forums around that same time?
Any info.? What exactly do you mean?

I mean that many people got very annoyed and left some of those the forums in droves.