Phirate - No Follow

1/09/08 01:59

The presence of a blog on Entrecard doesn't say anything about it, it is not more relevant, more popular or more insightful than a blog without an Entrecard. The only thing that can be said about it is that the blog owner is smart ;)

As a result, we use the nofollow to communicate to search engines that the links are user-submitted and we can't really say anything about whether they'd provide someone searching for something with better information than any other site.

In a sense it's a bit sad, in that I believe many Entrecarders have great sites that would be a good search result, but it's important for us to be a good net citizens and part of that is doing our best to provide search engines with accurate information so that they can provide the best search results for all of us. Doing anything other than nofollow on the links would provide a recommendation that simply isn't accurate.

At some point I expect the presence or otherwise of nofollow will no longer be an issue - algorithms in the relevance area have been getting better in leaps and bounds and manual hints like that are rather crude, but until then we just have to help where we can.