You ever write up an entire blog entry then not post it because you were not sure it made sense? A couple weeks ago I wrote up an entry on how Google should create some sort of tag that would allow you to surround links telling Google to ignore any links in that tag. Like a <ignorelinks> tag or something. This would be a way of stopping comment spam, since it would remove the main benefit spammers are looking for (PageRank).
Well it turns out I should have posted that, because Google is doing something very similar. They have created an attribute that you can add to a href tag that tells Google to ignore that link. I think this is a good solution, not as easy to implement as a big container tag, but still good and probably more practical in the long run.
The only downside to this is that people can now control their Google juice. Let's say someone is posting a link to a competitor's press release, now they can throw a little attribute in and deprive that competitor of well deserved Google juice. Google is giving us a little bit of control over the most important part of their search engine, something I did not think they would want to do.
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