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
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