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> Google considers his links low quality because they are. So what? Why should I have to care that Jeremy Palmer (or any other person) is linking to my site?

> Google considers his links low quality because they are. So what? Why should I have to care that Jeremy Palmer (or any other person) is linking to my site? The point of the article is that webmasters are going around trying to get links to their sites removed because it might get them penalised by Google. That is not natural or desirable behaviour. Site owners shouldn't have to care about that. Many have resorted to adding 'nofollow' to all of their own outbound links for fear of being punished by Google for linking to 'spammy' sites and appearing to be part of a paid/circular links scheme. It all sounds very broken to me. Note: I have no interest in SEO whatsoever, and I only have a single low traffic web site.

sbierwagen 12y ago
If you've got bad links, just disavow them. Wikipedia has to nofollow links because anybody in the world can add a spammy link to an article. NYT nofollows links because they're old media, and don't understand the web.
- anon1385 12y ago
  People use nofollow because they believe (rightly or wrongly, none of us know for sure since it's a secret) that if you link to a site that later turns out to be a link farm you can be punished for it because it appears to Google that you are part of the paid links scheme. 'Turns out' meaning either it was a link farm all along and you didn't notice, or didn't think it mattered, or because the site got bought/hacked and now is just a link farm. (I'm using 'link farm' in the broadest possible sense here since I'm not familiar with all the various ways a site can be deemed to be engaging in paid links and I believe there are quite a few and it's intentionally vague). Even if Google isn't penalising you for that today, they may well tomorrow. So using nofollow seems like quite a rational thing to do for any individual site as there isn't any downside as far as I know, only potential benefits. Additionally, manually disavowing links hardly seems like a scalable solution. As somebody with a small website that I spend very little time maintaining, I don't want to have to regularly be checking some Google console for 'bad links'that I have to manually disavow to prevent getting delisted.
  - xentronium 12y ago
    > Even if Google isn't penalising you for that today, they may well tomorrow. So using nofollow seems like quite a rational thing to do for any individual site as there isn't any downside as far as I know, only potential benefits. Breaking internet connectivity is a downside for society as a whole.
deleted 12y ago
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Angostura 12y ago
> The point of the article is that webmasters are going around trying to get links to their sites removed because it might get them penalised by Google. That's because previously webmasters we going around trying to get links to their sites added because it might get them rewarded by Google. Google is trying to prevent the aberrant behaviour that the success of Pagerank caused in the structure of the Web, unfortunately there can be some collateral damage.

sbierwagen 12y ago

If you've got bad links, just disavow them. Wikipedia has to nofollow links because anybody in the world can add a spammy link to an article. NYT nofollows links because they're old media, and don't understand the web.

anon1385 12y ago
People use nofollow because they believe (rightly or wrongly, none of us know for sure since it's a secret) that if you link to a site that later turns out to be a link farm you can be punished for it because it appears to Google that you are part of the paid links scheme. 'Turns out' meaning either it was a link farm all along and you didn't notice, or didn't think it mattered, or because the site got bought/hacked and now is just a link farm. (I'm using 'link farm' in the broadest possible sense here since I'm not familiar with all the various ways a site can be deemed to be engaging in paid links and I believe there are quite a few and it's intentionally vague). Even if Google isn't penalising you for that today, they may well tomorrow. So using nofollow seems like quite a rational thing to do for any individual site as there isn't any downside as far as I know, only potential benefits. Additionally, manually disavowing links hardly seems like a scalable solution. As somebody with a small website that I spend very little time maintaining, I don't want to have to regularly be checking some Google console for 'bad links'that I have to manually disavow to prevent getting delisted.
- xentronium 12y ago
  > Even if Google isn't penalising you for that today, they may well tomorrow. So using nofollow seems like quite a rational thing to do for any individual site as there isn't any downside as far as I know, only potential benefits. Breaking internet connectivity is a downside for society as a whole.

deleted 12y ago

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Angostura 12y ago

> The point of the article is that webmasters are going around trying to get links to their sites removed because it might get them penalised by Google. That's because previously webmasters we going around trying to get links to their sites added because it might get them rewarded by Google. Google is trying to prevent the aberrant behaviour that the success of Pagerank caused in the structure of the Web, unfortunately there can be some collateral damage.