Google's No-Google tag blesses the Balkanized web

[Mogga]

"rel=nofollow"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01...ogle_nogoogle/

[Rich]

Seems like an odd move to me, but it is happening: -
http://www.google.com/googleblog/200...ment-spam.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/arch...llow_tags.aspx
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000069.html

"Any link with this tag will indicate to a crawler it is not necessarily approved by this page and shouldn’t be followed nor contribute weight for ranking."

So it seems like an ok idea, but SEOs will try using it to to increase their rankings - hiding outgoing links. Bakedjake said at WMW: -

Google gets wise - hello, here's a bunch of norel tags. OK, fine, ignore the ones on pages called mt-comments, because we really don't care about blogspam in the first place. After we've done that, let's look at all of the SEOs out there that are trying to make recip links look like one ways! Wowowowowow... a new way to catch SEOs!

[matbennett]

Maybe Google should come up with a way of downgrading sites who's owners can't be bothered to moderate their feedback mechanisms instead.

[Green2K]

Dumb idea, this will become the de-facto linking method for most folks now (hey, why should I give away free increases in search engine rankings?!?).

The consequences will go far beyond what Google et al. intented.

Green2K.

[Lee_Owen]

So do you get points from google for implementing "rel=nofollow" on your forums, blogs etc?

[watcher]

So Google have publically admitted that they cannot ascertain the true value of links.

So much for those theories about requiring relevant and authorative links. As far as Google is concerned a link is a link unless told otherwise.

Text link brokers will be rubbing their hands.

[Dynamoo]

It's like the Heisenberg Principle.. the act of observation changes what is observed. With Google, it's the system of PageRank based on link authority which changes the nature of link authority.

The same thing happened to AltaVista before Google - a system based on keyword density and other on-page factors, once webmasters begin to understand how it works, they'll exploit it and the system will change.