

Medium abuses nofollow - captn3m0
https://captnemo.in/blog/2015/04/06/medium-abuses-nofollow/

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butwhy
What a horrible article. They are not "abusing" anything; it's their site and
it's common for large sites to deploy nofollow. It discourages spammers from
creating lots of outbound links for seo purposes and weakens the overall value
of outbound links from their site.

"Medium hosts 300,000 articles published by half a million users, and yet none
of these links back to external website, because of something called
"rel=nofollow". - what are you talking about? That's not how it works at all.
The hyperlinks still operate just fine.

~~~
captn3m0
Yes, I understand what nofollow is for. The links do work, but they are not
followed by search engines, which means content is not credited, as it should
be.

Also, the title was styled after a similar blog post about StackOverflow
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4774470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4774470)).

~~~
butwhy
Why should it be? They own the site, so they don't need to give up their link
juice to every legit person and every spammer who wants to link out from their
site.

Your own link just stated that they enacted nofollow due to abuse and because
Google was punishing them by removing pages all together. Then you go on and
call them "abusers" for protecting their content. wat.

~~~
captn3m0
I'm not saying that removing nofollow for medium is the right solution. That
would be inviting a horde of spammers on to the site.

However, there can be better solutions (such as the ones by StackOverflow).
Content quality (which can be measured by medium) to allow good quality
content have outbound links would be another.

A simple start would be to have a whitelist of domains that can be considered
authoritative (as suggested in the linked tweet).

Yes, this is a hard problem, but it needs to be solved.

~~~
butwhy
No, it doesn't. Go buy your own domain.

off the top of my head, digitalpoint is a popular forum that has always
operated with nofollow and I imagine many other sites do, as well.

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paulfreeman
If they removed nofollow it would influence companies with huge SEO budgets to
start working on there at putting out discreet promotional content. You would
see services offering links on Medium etc..

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panopticon
I agree that it would be nice if Medium could find a way to allow search
engines to do their magic without inviting a deluge of promotional content.

That being said, this article approaches the problem in a very confrontational
and unappealing way...

~~~
captn3m0
You might be right. I should tone it down.

