IO ERROR's Journal: Nofollow will kill the Web

Ah, so /. has enabled rel="nofollow" on links posted by users. How brain-dead have they become? Nofollow causes search engines not to follow the link. Have you really thought this through? This isn't so much about PageRank as it is about the ability for search engines to find things in the first place! Sure, people can follow my link back to my home page, but Google can't? Therefore Google has no idea my page is even there, unless someone else links to it without nofollow.

Once the conversion of the entire web to nofollow is complete, Google will be unable to calculate the PageRank of anything, and its results suddenly become entirely irrelevant, and look like AltaVista, which can't bring up microsoft.com if you search for "Microsoft."

Maybe the nice folks in charge of /. are trying to do bloggers a service and protect them from comment spam. STOP IT! It isn't the right way to go about it. It doesn't work! And it's going to have the opposite effect. You're also "protecting" those bloggers from being found in search engines.

Thanks a fucking lot, /.

Better idea?

[smittyoneeach]

How to fix this 'problem', then?

Re:Better idea?

[IO ERROR]

See http://www.ioerror.us/2005/03/21/slashdot-turns-on -nofollow/ [ioerror.us]

Re:

[account_deleted]

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