[theforum] nofollow in articles (was Re: New article)

Drs Marcel Feenstra, MALD, MBA marcel at wintasy.com
Wed Oct 17 06:57:32 CDT 2007


William Anderson wrote:

> Your English is just peachy.

Ta ;-)

William Anderson wrote:

> I still don't know where this notion of "proper credit" comes from.
> You've linked to some page, or pages, and the reader of your article
> can
> choose to click, or not click, on the links to those pages.  Why the
> big
> fuss about nofollow?

The thing is that "nofollow" is a way of saying: I will not vouch for the
page I link to, I want to make sure that it gets no credit whatsoever from
search engines, I do not want it to be a proper "part of the Web" so to
speak. "Regular" links are the default; "nofollow" is an explicit indicator
of lack of trust, which is out of place in material that has passed
editorial review, IMO.

William Anderson wrote:

> And the reason I mentioned "to your own sites" is that's what you
> admitted yourself: "... As for the 'nofollowed' links in my article ...
> they are the actual sites for which I designed ..."

Oh, I see what you mean. I was simply trying to explain why I thought the
links were relevant: "they are the actual sites...", etc.

William Anderson wrote:

> > and I could give you dozens of other examples. (If you should think
> that I
> > added these external links only moments ago, to make my point, simply
> check
> > the Google cache.)
> 
> Why would I think that?

Not "you", specifically, I should have said: "If anyone should think...",
etc. I was responding to one potential "objection" that I could think of,
but that was clearly premature --I never intended to "accuse" you, or anyone
else, of "ill will". My apologies if I offended people!

William Anderson wrote:

> I can't stand SEO.  It's spawned an industry of consultants who are
> mainly greedy twats, who leech money from clients while gaming the
> search engines to their own ends.  Most core tenets of SEO stem from
> sane web design, so they should form the backbone of any well-designed
> site as a matter of course, not merely just as hooks into working your
> way up search rankings.

I actually *agree* with much of what you say... :-)

> Related to that: of course you can use Flash or JavaScript for
> navigation, as long as you're sensible enough to put in text links
> underneath that for people with flash and/or js disabled.  That's the
> primary reason for doing so; not to game the search engines into
> crawling stuff on your site, but to permit those who decide - or
> require! - that text only is the way to go.  Think people on slow
> connections, or blind people with screen readers.

Again, agreed, although I would phrase certain things slightly differently
--I would not say: try "to game the search engines into crawling stuff on
your site", but rather: try to avoid *blocking* the SE.

William Anderson wrote:

> IME "search engine friendly" URLs actually stem from making URLs
> human-readable and -memorable.  Making them part of SEO is just another
> thing they've borged into that process.

Human-readable: agreed; as for memorable: I think that's a bit of a stretch,
since most people will visit a page using either a bookmark or a search
engine, rather than by typing in some fifteen-word, fourteen-hyphen URL...
;-)

Marcel




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