4 ms·

I run large forums and mark my links "nofollow". I see no reason or benefit to me to change to or add "ugc". It's not clear that there's any benefits for me.

by buro9 7y ago

I run large forums and mark my links "nofollow". I see no reason or benefit to me to change to or add "ugc". It's not clear that there's any benefits for me. And it's vague enough that I don't know that there are not downsides. Seems best to do nothing.

kazinator 7y ago
Complete agreement. Furthermore, bad actors out there will abuse "ugc": they will mark terabytes of robot-generated content as "user-generated". It will not be possible to rely on it as an indication of organic content or anything of the sort. Search engines won't be able to use that for ranking, for instance.
- wolco 7y ago
  This change is not for you. This change allows them to treat facebook/twitter/reddit links with weight if the other signals are present.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    If I know that I'm traversing and processing facebook/twitter/reddit links, doesn't "nofollow" already indicate user generated content? (Even if some "nofollow" links do not do that, I can probably separate those based on their position in the documents.) If you're going to treat specific sites specially, then go in all the way and be prepared to have your logic understand any/all aspects of their structure. Or else, don't bother.
tylerl 7y ago
>> "...no reason or benefit..." I donno, seems legit to me. Adding "nofollow" just means "I'm not accountable for this" -- it's overloaded to mean both "My site is linking here but I didn't vet it first" (the UGC version), versus "This isn't actually me, it's an advertiser borrowing space on my site" (the sponsored version). Your site/forum might want "credit" for being a sort of attention aggregation hub without necessarily taking responsibility for all the content your users post -- you may want a softer middle ground if such a thing becomes available. But in the advertiser version you're just renting out page real estate; your relationship with those links ends the moment the ad is displayed. Giving you a way to differentiate between the two could let you benefit from ranking and placement that more appropriately takes your user content into consideration while better filtering out noise from ad content.

by buro9 7y ago

kazinator 7y ago

Complete agreement. Furthermore, bad actors out there will abuse "ugc": they will mark terabytes of robot-generated content as "user-generated". It will not be possible to rely on it as an indication of organic content or anything of the sort. Search engines won't be able to use that for ranking, for instance.

wolco 7y ago
This change is not for you. This change allows them to treat facebook/twitter/reddit links with weight if the other signals are present.
- kazinator 7y ago
  If I know that I'm traversing and processing facebook/twitter/reddit links, doesn't "nofollow" already indicate user generated content? (Even if some "nofollow" links do not do that, I can probably separate those based on their position in the documents.) If you're going to treat specific sites specially, then go in all the way and be prepared to have your logic understand any/all aspects of their structure. Or else, don't bother.

tylerl 7y ago

>> "...no reason or benefit..." I donno, seems legit to me. Adding "nofollow" just means "I'm not accountable for this" -- it's overloaded to mean both "My site is linking here but I didn't vet it first" (the UGC version), versus "This isn't actually me, it's an advertiser borrowing space on my site" (the sponsored version). Your site/forum might want "credit" for being a sort of attention aggregation hub without necessarily taking responsibility for all the content your users post -- you may want a softer middle ground if such a thing becomes available. But in the advertiser version you're just renting out page real estate; your relationship with those links ends the moment the ad is displayed. Giving you a way to differentiate between the two could let you benefit from ranking and placement that more appropriately takes your user content into consideration while better filtering out noise from ad content.