Content

• Home
• Action
• Blogging
• Croydon Residents Against Parking Plans
• CSS
• Flashmobs
• Gallery
• Garden Project
• Holidays and trips
• Life
• Listening
• Media Management MA
• News
• Opinion
• Pittock Reunion
• Rants
• Reading
• Simon Cox's
• Standards
• Tech
• Tickled
• Watching
• Web
• Webcam
• All entries
• Tag Cloud
• Loxley Barton Falls

Webcam

Home » Web » rel nofollow suits commerce users of Google

« Support Andre DeCruze for the AutoSport Porsche Carrera Cup Drive | Main | Breadless sandwiches »

rel nofollow suits commerce users of Google

Commercial users of Google have finally been given a way to reduce the amount of Blogs clogging up their search results.

There were reports on the Register and Wired over a year ago suggesting that Google were thinking about taking blogs out of the search results because they were cluttering up the commercial results. No doubt they were under a great deal of pressure from commercial entities who suddenly found that they had a bucket load more competitors to race against to get a top listing - potentially costing them a lot more expenditure with Search Engine Optimisation.

Frankly if I was running a commercial site that relied so heavily on on-line search results to bring in traffic I would have been very annoyed at the way blog results have taken over the search results.

As a web user I am delighted that the playing field has been evened out and that I can find information on subjects without having a commercial edge on it. I hate having to wade through loads of results for sales when I am trying to find some information on product. It even worse when you are trying to find out some information about a place - normally you got pages full of hotels, B&Bs and cottages.

But blogging has changed the landscape and as it has matured from simplistic 'I feel rough today' diary entries to interesting articles, eye witness writings, political analysis and heavyweight pieces so the search engine results have become more useful.

However things might be about to change again. Moveable Type and Google have got together as major blog players, Google own Blogger, with Yahoo and MSN to throw up the rel="nofollow" attribute. this is brilliant work by the industry to combat comment spam on blog sites and Moveable Type have already produced a rel-nofollow plug-in for their software.

If every one installs it it should kill comment spam off quite quickly. However at the same time it will mean that comments themselves will be reduced on all blogs because an incentive, or you could say a reward, for adding to a thread of comments has been to get a link to your site. If you take the topic further and write about it on your own blog you may well use a trackback - which will also fall foul of the nofollow rel.

This means that this whole network of links between blogs that give them such high rankings will start to crumble and the page rankings and search engine positioning will drop and the commercial sites will start to gain ground again. In some ways this is not good news for the search engines either as they may see their placed adverts revenue drop as the blog 'chaff' dissipates.

It will be interesting to see what develops over the next few months.

I have just added the MT plug in to my site and so I don't expect anyone to bother to comment here any more!

Posted by Simon at January 21, 2005 12:46 PM

---

Trackback Pings

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference rel nofollow suits commerce users of Google:

» But I Don't Like Spam... from Alan Bell 's Weblog
Nope, not a posting about the Monty Python Christmas special. No, comment about the recent, and what appears to be on-going, mass blogspot spam attack both the blogs have been under the last few days. Searching around the 'net, I'm... [Read More]

Tracked on December 12, 2005 11:26 PM

---

Comments

1 January 21, 2005 2:21 PM Simon Cox

Thought I might as well test the new plug in.