
Will Google Penalize Itself Again for Using Advertorials? - fraqed
http://searchengineland.com/will-google-penalize-chromebooks-advertorials-149452
======
PavlovsCat
How does Google determine wether a link is paid or not? I stopped using
nofollow at all on my personal site, because I figured if I like something
enough to invite humans to go there, I might as well "vouch" for those links
in the sight of search engines; and while I'm pretty sure a human would never
flag the site, when reading about algorithms (in this case, without hearing
how they actually work) I sometimes get a bit nervous, just because I'm doing
my own thing without paying too much attention to what is "standard". Just
take HN for example: why doesn't it pass link juice to the stories, wouldn't
that help improve the web/search results? And if that got changed, would
Google act all stupid, or simply enjoy and use the additional signal provided?

~~~
dbaupp
I believe that user-content sites use nofollow because it reduces the amount
of spam (at least, that's the common wisdom), since without it, a spammer
would be able to leverage the high rating of the sites (e.g. HN, Reddit,
StackOverflow).

~~~
PavlovsCat
I can understand it for something for a forum, or links posted in comments,
but otherwise, I still wonder..

"a spammer would be able to leverage the high rating of the sites"

Sure; as would legitimately useful content. A spammer can already take
advantage of eyeballs, so taking of nofollow doesn't mean you don't have to
remove spam; and if you remove spam, what's the use of nofollow? As a safety
net? Well, one could e.g. take nofollow off for links that have a lot of
upvotes etc.. I'm just not convinced that even the harm by some random spammer
getting some search engine love for a short amount of time outweighs the long
term benefit of an "honest" graph of relevance and connectedness, if that's
not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Sites like HN and reddit have a high rating partly because they have links
people like, and do not consider spam, and nofollow might be presenting a
completely broken picture to search engines of what is actually going on.
That's fine by me, I'm not complaining, but I really do hope being a black
hole of page rank doesn't become some kind of status quo, against which sites
which do it "my way" would then stick out negatively.

~~~
ferongr
>if you remove spam, what's the use of nofollow?

To prevent a search engine from poking around links and executing actions
meant from human beings.

I help someone manage a small online music stream with automatically queued
user requests. The community around it is small and nice so there's no need
for captchas or authentication. Without nofollow Google and friends would
randomly request tracks for playback.

~~~
cbr

        To prevent a search engine from poking
        around links and executing actions
        meant from human beings.
    

That's not how search engines interpret nofollow. You should use robots.txt
instead.

EDIT: for details, see the original blog post, which says "those links won't
get any credit" not "those links will be ignored":
[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-
sp...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html)

~~~
walshemj
Its how I understand no follow - Used in login and print page links and the
like to stop the creation of massive numbers of duplicate pages.

~~~
PavlovsCat
It works for that, because it means "disregard this link for ranking". But it
doesn't forbid bots from crawling those links anyway, which is what the other
poster seems to think it does.

------
petrel
I just do not understand this Do-follow and nofollow. I don't want to. I use
captcha and give some credit to those who spam manually.

~~~
walshemj
You wont like it when you get a UGC spam penalty though - had to sort one of
those out for one of Reed Elsivers sites.

