lonecity.com

It became apparent a while back that the spam problem is getting just a bit out of control.  Lots of people have come up with ideas to combat the incoming flood.  Apparently just as many have found a reason to add to it.  The simple truth to it all is that until we hold advertisers accountable for the damage done by spam, adware, spyware, ect, they won’t take the measures needed to stop it.  The only way were ever going to stop getting viagra ads popping up at us is to hold the drug company who owns viagra financially accountable for damages when ads for their product pop up where they shouldn’t be.  Its true that they aren’t the ones posting those ads, but in the end they are the ones ultimately paying the people who are.  I’m getting off on a rant again so lets get back on topic.  The purpose of this article is to discuss how to use one of those many anti-spam tools to help boost your website’s Page Rank.

The tool I’m talking about is the rel=”nofollow” tag, or just nofollow for short.  Google introduced this as an extra bit of html code that can be added to your webpage to let search engines know that a link isn’t related to or approved by your site.  The premise was that people would use the tag wherever website users could post their own comments on blog’s, forums, ect.  That way if someone were to post a comment on my blog with a link to their website the link back to them wouldn’t count. 

Nearly every blog on the planet has the nofollow tag embedded into it automatically but the spam is still coming.  Wonder why?  Its simple.  It is easier for the spammers to just post their crap on every blog out there hoping to stumble on the few that don’t use the tag.  The end result is that we still get spam.  The people who honestly deserved a good link back for posting a valuable and insightful comment get penalized with no credit and the spammers go right on ahead.

If the nofollow tag is broken why do we continue to use it?  I think the tag is actually a great concept that was spoiled on the wrong cause.  Now webmasters have a way of putting weight to the outbound links on their site.  In fact I’d like to see a few other “weights” applied to the rel=”" tag.  Say something like rel=”high” rel=”medium” and rel=”low”. 

A search engine is a machine.  It can’t see things the way we humans do.  Personally I think google has done an incredible job of making thier engine capable of distinguishing between content and filler.  At the end of the day though there are always going to be things that get misinterpreted.  The rel=”" tag opens a way for us as webmasters to sort out those misunderstandings. 

Lets try an example here: say you have a photograph sharing website.  There is bound to be some turd who wants to post lewd content in the same album as your pictures of your adorable new born puppies.  Obviously this site is going to need a legal disclaimer.  Its also going to need a page with rules explaining exactly what is and isn’t appropriate.  Its probably going to need a webform to report abuse.  What do all of these pages have in common?  They don’t have anything to do with the content of the website.  When you list your site on the search engines, you don’t want people to find you who were looking for “report abuse” or “lewd photos.”  You want people to find your site that were looking for “photo sharing.”

The solution is to use the rel=”nofolow” tag with the internal linking of your site.  Pages that don’t conform to the sites main focus get the tag.  Pages that do have the tag omitted.  An example of a website that uses this strategy is SudokuPrinter.net.  The site is a very simple webtool that prints out sudoku puzzles.  The main page is about sudoku.  The site also has several other pages about sudoku including rules, how to play, facts, and crediting some of the people who helped in making the site.  All of these pages are linked together on the site without the nofollow tag because they all have the same content theme.  There is also a page where you can contact the site owner.  It uses a captcha and a webform to send email to the webmaster.  There isn’t any sudoku related content on the page, so instead of bieng linked like the other pages, every link going to it has the rel=”nofollow” tag.  The contact page is an important part of the site just like the other pages so it shouldn’t be left out.  The site isn’t about webmail or captcha though, so google shouldn’t be counting the contact form in its calculation of what the site is about. 

Your ranking in google and other search engines is a guess at how related it is to a given topic someone searches for.  If your site is only about sudoku it should rank pretty high for someone looking for sudoku.  The webmaster has just used the nofollow tag to let google and the other search engines know his site is about sudoku, not about webmail.  That way his site gets found when people are looking for “sudoku printer”, not when people are looking for “sudoku webmail.”  The former is obviously more attractive to a human, but to a computer the two terms are equal.  It just happens that alot less people are going to be interested or search for the latter term.  They are also not going to find what they wanted if they found the sudokuprinter.net website.

To sum it up: Your pagerank as listed in rank checker tools may not change from a simple trick like using the nofollow tag to weed out unrelated parts of your site.  However your actual pagerank will be boosted by doing so.  You will apply more of the rank that is assigned to your site twards the keywords and topics that your site is actually about by not applying any of your PR to pages that don’t fit the theme.