Digg to Apply Nofollow to External Links
Why should you care?
Is this a good or bad thing?
What does nofollow mean anyways?
Glad you asked.
You should care because a lot of folks were trying to game the Google ranking system by link dropping their space junk onto Google using social bookmarking…of which Digg, is the king.
What’s social bookmarking? Also glad you asked. Social bookmarking are sites where people come together and share awesome links with eachother and they’re VERY popular. …and Google at some point in the game decided that a few of them were interesting enough to provide a TON of PageRank to which made them big targets for SEOs & general link spammers. You could publish an article, a blog post, a video or whatever and go drop a link at Digg or one of the other social bookmarking sites and Google would give some weight and notice to that link placement.
Now that this game has been played out pretty heavily and abused to death, Digg decided to put the smack down of a ‘nofollow’ tag on external links to websites that they couldn’t verify as trustworthy or had some level of true ‘user popularity.’
See their post on it today here: http://blog.digg.com/?p=864
Anyways, this nofollow tag on links simply means that they’re going to tell Google to not worry with following those links unless they’re trustworthy.
Is this good or bad?
Bottom line it’s a GREAT thing for both SEOs, internet marketers AND users. There won’t be such a rash of abuse coming from Diggs and Google’s bot won’t be instructed to follow any spamtastic links.
Ok to wrap up, what does nofollow mean anyways? Years ago Google decided to allow webmasters to apply this little sniplet of code to their links
<a href=”http://somedomain.com/link-yada-yada/” rel=”nofollow”>text or image link</a>
This would allow the site owner or webmaster to tell Google to not be concerned with crawling that link. This was useful so that site owners could post links but not waste quality outbound links on trivial stuff…and dilute their website’s Page Rank strength.
Hope that geek speak makes sense.
Anyways, Cheers to Digg for getting on board with helping to fight spam and also to apparently be applying some assistance to Google in determining what might be a quality outbound link and what isn’t. In this statement it seemed clear it’d make it easy for Google to determine which links Digg thought might be worthy of crawling:
“while still flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content. We’ve added rel=”nofollow” to any external link that we’re not sure we can vouch for. This includes all external links from comments, user profiles and story pages below a certain threshold of popularity.”
Take care and remember, focus on building quality content for users. Link building schemes are just that…schemes. Use them only when you are certain that your conent being published is truly link-drop-worthy and of benefit to your audience.
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