4 ms·

It's the crisis of the hyperlink: It's diminished to the point where Google is afraid of losing it's previously dominant signal for good. Personal publishing h

It's the crisis of the hyperlink: It's diminished to the point where Google is afraid of losing it's previously dominant signal for good. Personal publishing has moved almost entirely to platforms that `nofollow` links. And commercial sites do whatever it takes to avoid linking anywhere but back, deeper into their own site. There have been some cases where I think people are behaving somewhat irresponsible with "nofollow": the German Wikipedia, for example, does it to all outbound links. That's understandable from a spam-fighting perspective. But, if search engines actually implement it draconically, it deprives the search index of vast amounts of collaborative filtering. I actually just checked, and couldn't find nofollows on either HN or Reddit links. Are they somehow setting them via some method other than the actual link tag? In any case, I was going to suggest that nofollow makes sense for the "new" queue, but it wouldn't hurt and possibly help to remove it once user generated content has reached certain milestones, i. e. user karma, or hitting the front page.

kylecordes 7y ago
A related source of great frustration: put some good stuff on the web. Lots of people link to it but almost entirely from social media platforms where every link is a nofollow. Somebody else working on gaming the system with SEO makes a less valuable and useful thing, but obtains (by subterfuge or diligent direct asking) some non-nofollow links. Your high-quality content will be outranked in search results by the other less-high-quality quality content. A reasonable improvement to this, to reinvigorate the hyperlink: social media platforms could stop using nofollow for links put in by users who themselves have built up a degree of reputation.
- alxmdev 7y ago
  It really does seem hard to get visitors these days, even for original niche content. The first page of Google search results is half social/video/news carousels instead of genuine long-term content, and a lot of the other links point to repetitive articles published by generic big-name websites that never really add anything new.
  - 9588 7y ago
    This is the point of nofollow, to get rid of small websites and to prevent them. The spam story is nonsens, it does nothing spam protection related.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  The thing is, all this really does is promote spamming and self promotion, its of no real direct benefit to the user.
ForHackernews 7y ago
It's funny because Google created this monster by attaching a value to links.
smitop 7y ago
> couldn't find nofollows on either HN or Reddit links HN nofollows job ads and posts under ~10 points (it's 5 in the opensource code, but it seems HN has been modified there). Old reddit has rel="nofollow" but then removes it via JavaScript for some reason. NewReddit displays OldReddit if it detects Googlebot is asking.
baddox 7y ago
> It's diminished to the point where Google is afraid of losing it's previously dominant signal for good. Is Google afraid of losing that signal? I don't have any data to back this up, but my guess is that Google's reliance on PageRank is greatly diminished now, and they probably use search result click-through rate and website engagement data (from Google Analytics and ads) as the primary signals for website relevance and quality.
- ma2rten 7y ago
  PageRank is not an important signal anymore, but Google still uses links in other ways. https://moz.com/blog/2019-study-on-link-ranking https://moz.com/blog/2019-study-on-link-ranking
makomk 7y ago
The English-language Wikipedia used to take an... interesting approach to nofollow, not sure if they still do. External links to most websites were nofollow with the exception of cross-wiki links to approved wikis including links to Jimmy Wales' commercial website Wikia. So the net result was that the trusted sources which Wikipedia heavily relied on got no boost but Wikia got a substantial boost in ranking.
lvncelot 7y ago
> but it wouldn't hurt and possibly help to remove it once user generated content has reached certain milestones, i. e. user karma, or hitting the front page. Wouldn't that also give a lot more incentive to reach those milestones illegitemately?

kylecordes 7y ago

A related source of great frustration: put some good stuff on the web. Lots of people link to it but almost entirely from social media platforms where every link is a nofollow. Somebody else working on gaming the system with SEO makes a less valuable and useful thing, but obtains (by subterfuge or diligent direct asking) some non-nofollow links. Your high-quality content will be outranked in search results by the other less-high-quality quality content. A reasonable improvement to this, to reinvigorate the hyperlink: social media platforms could stop using nofollow for links put in by users who themselves have built up a degree of reputation.

alxmdev 7y ago
It really does seem hard to get visitors these days, even for original niche content. The first page of Google search results is half social/video/news carousels instead of genuine long-term content, and a lot of the other links point to repetitive articles published by generic big-name websites that never really add anything new.
- 9588 7y ago
  This is the point of nofollow, to get rid of small websites and to prevent them. The spam story is nonsens, it does nothing spam protection related.
throwaway2048 7y ago
The thing is, all this really does is promote spamming and self promotion, its of no real direct benefit to the user.

ForHackernews 7y ago

It's funny because Google created this monster by attaching a value to links.

smitop 7y ago

> couldn't find nofollows on either HN or Reddit links HN nofollows job ads and posts under ~10 points (it's 5 in the opensource code, but it seems HN has been modified there). Old reddit has rel="nofollow" but then removes it via JavaScript for some reason. NewReddit displays OldReddit if it detects Googlebot is asking.

baddox 7y ago

> It's diminished to the point where Google is afraid of losing it's previously dominant signal for good. Is Google afraid of losing that signal? I don't have any data to back this up, but my guess is that Google's reliance on PageRank is greatly diminished now, and they probably use search result click-through rate and website engagement data (from Google Analytics and ads) as the primary signals for website relevance and quality.

ma2rten 7y ago
PageRank is not an important signal anymore, but Google still uses links in other ways. https://moz.com/blog/2019-study-on-link-ranking https://moz.com/blog/2019-study-on-link-ranking

makomk 7y ago

The English-language Wikipedia used to take an... interesting approach to nofollow, not sure if they still do. External links to most websites were nofollow with the exception of cross-wiki links to approved wikis including links to Jimmy Wales' commercial website Wikia. So the net result was that the trusted sources which Wikipedia heavily relied on got no boost but Wikia got a substantial boost in ranking.

lvncelot 7y ago

> but it wouldn't hurt and possibly help to remove it once user generated content has reached certain milestones, i. e. user karma, or hitting the front page. Wouldn't that also give a lot more incentive to reach those milestones illegitemately?