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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 ratin

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.

dasil003 14y ago
> and if you remove spam, what's the use of nofollow? For the period in between when spam is posted and when you remove it, during which there is an extremely high chance Google has already indexed it.
- PavlovsCat 14y ago
  Don't submissions here get screened? I was under that impression. Also, this doesn't apply to stuff that has hundreds of votes. But even ignoring all that, just as an Gedankenexperiment: Yeah, and? Stuff has to stick around for quite a while to rise, domains have to be known, etc. It's easy to get "into the index", just as easy to drop out of it, but when it comes to any real traction even a front page post for hours is just a blip.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    I thought we were speaking in general not about HN specifically. In any case, no they are not screened. Submit a story and witness it appear instantly at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/newest
    - PavlovsCat 14y ago
      I thought we were speaking in general not about HN specifically. Not just HN, but I replied to this, so no: "(e.g. HN, Reddit, StackOverflow)"
  - DanBC 14y ago
    HN has some lists of sites that will always be dead, and some hellbanned users who's posts will always be dead. All posts go to (http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/newest). It's a good idea to visit that page and upvote the great content, ignore the not so great content, and flag the really bad stuff. I think, but I could be wrong, that any user can flag an article. But maybe there's a karma threshold.
ferongr 14y ago
>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 14y ago
  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-spam.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp...
  - walshemj 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
  - ferongr 14y ago
    Well, according to the logs we don't get requests from Google or other kinds of bots so it works for our use case.
- dbaupp 14y ago
  You can solve that problem by using POST rather than GET for the playback requests. (I.e. convert each playback request link to a <form> with hidden fields specifying the track info and a "request it" button, or just use ajax and "new XMLHttpRequest('POST')" or whatever is appropriate for the JavaScript library being used.)

dasil003 14y ago

> and if you remove spam, what's the use of nofollow? For the period in between when spam is posted and when you remove it, during which there is an extremely high chance Google has already indexed it.

PavlovsCat 14y ago
Don't submissions here get screened? I was under that impression. Also, this doesn't apply to stuff that has hundreds of votes. But even ignoring all that, just as an Gedankenexperiment: Yeah, and? Stuff has to stick around for quite a while to rise, domains have to be known, etc. It's easy to get "into the index", just as easy to drop out of it, but when it comes to any real traction even a front page post for hours is just a blip.
- dasil003 14y ago
  I thought we were speaking in general not about HN specifically. In any case, no they are not screened. Submit a story and witness it appear instantly at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/newest
  - PavlovsCat 14y ago
    I thought we were speaking in general not about HN specifically. Not just HN, but I replied to this, so no: "(e.g. HN, Reddit, StackOverflow)"
- DanBC 14y ago
  HN has some lists of sites that will always be dead, and some hellbanned users who's posts will always be dead. All posts go to (http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/newest). It's a good idea to visit that page and upvote the great content, ignore the not so great content, and flag the really bad stuff. I think, but I could be wrong, that any user can flag an article. But maybe there's a karma threshold.

ferongr 14y ago

>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 14y ago
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-spam.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp...
- walshemj 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
- ferongr 14y ago
  Well, according to the logs we don't get requests from Google or other kinds of bots so it works for our use case.
dbaupp 14y ago
You can solve that problem by using POST rather than GET for the playback requests. (I.e. convert each playback request link to a <form> with hidden fields specifying the track info and a "request it" button, or just use ajax and "new XMLHttpRequest('POST')" or whatever is appropriate for the JavaScript library being used.)