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by dion.
Original Post: rel="nofollow" is a great idea
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I love the new rel="nofollow" attribute that you can put into links now.
I am also amazed at how quick the attribute went from an idea to implemented in a lot of software!
The idea is that you can place a rel="nofollow" attribute to a link. E.g. <a href="http://to.some.site.com/foo" rel="nofollow">foo</a>
If a link has this attribute, the engines such as Google, Y!, MSN Search, etc know that the link isn't 'trusted'. This is particularly helpful in areas such as blogs when people can randomly write comments with URLs (unless they are stripped etc of course). No the blog software can always put in the new attribute and spammers won't be able to bump their PageRank.
Although this is great to see, it would be nice to have a few more semantics (and have them defined in a small spec somewhere).
For example, maybe I want to say "I really like this site", "I don't really know about this site but don't punish it", "This site it totally untrusted", etc.
I also don't know about the value "nofollow". How about "untrusted" or "trusted" or "super-duper-fan-baybee" :)
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