Christopher Baus: “I boldly predict that in one year Google will give up and ignore “nofollow” meta-data.” His argument, in a nutshell: “Link data is Google’s number one asset. Today they just admitted that asset isn’t as valuable as it used to be.” Bah. They admitted, instead, that the world has changed, and that A links-to B no longer strictly implies A endorses B.
Update: It seems that there’s a growing backlash against nofollow, claiming it damages the Web or PageRank doesn’t motivate spammers (+) or even that spammers don’t even bother with HREFs sometimes.
I guess my problem is that I keep viewing spammers as essentially rational (which they are) but I totally misapprehend the utility of their various strategies. (Can you tell I’m enrolled in a game theory course this semester?)
Update #2: Via Brad DeLong, an even-handed opinion by Chuq Von Rospach: “Why ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ isn’t the answer. Or is at best only a partial one.” In essence, not only is it free to comment-spam, but it’s also highly unlikely that weblog software will be updated to annotate untrusted links appropriately. I think I can get behind this viewpoint—it’s a great idea, a useful thing to add to our bag of WWW tricks, but it won’t eliminate comment spam tomorrow.
