- From: Nicholas Chase <nchase@earthlink.net>
- Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 17:19:34 +0000
- To: www-html@w3.org
Mark Birbeck wrote: > [In response to the various suggestions for different values of @rel.] > > > In the first instance -- in relation to the current proposal from Google -- > why do we need to mark-up the tag at all? The issue is very specifically > that Google does not want to follow the links in blogs, and it also does not > want to give a higher page ranking to any pages referenced from those blogs. The very specific issue is that Google's (and other search engines') following of links in blogs has created a situation in which spammers are rewarded for posting unrelated and (in many cases) offensive content on blogs. This is not a problem for Google, it's a problem for everybody else. Comment spam -- at least the kind that I keep getting hit with -- isn't likely to pollute search results for anything other than the keywords its targeting, which, frankly, are a small set. The larger nuisance is to the rest of us, who have to put up with it appearing on our sites. > 2. Faced with this secondary problem they *could* have said "why not add > some metadata to the head of the document to indicate that it is a blog, > and then make our crawler behave accordingly". Because just knowing its a blog doesn't solve the problem. You WANT search engines to follow most links on a blog, that's the POINT. Even on a comments page, you're likely to have a few dozen blogroll links that you want followed. This designation needs to be made on a link-by-link basis, or as mentioned before, on a container basis, but that's probably even worse. > 3. Or they could have changed their blogging software so that any comments > that are posted that contain links have to be approved by the blog > owner. That's great, but that just works for THEIR software. That Google owns Blogger is only a minor point; it's their search engine that has created this problem. ---- Nick
Received on Friday, 21 January 2005 18:50:39 UTC