racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

It started as an idealistic move to help combat spam in blogs, websites and comment threads. But today, some bloggers feel that the rel=nofollow microformat is not a good solution to a widespread problem. Some thoughts here:

• Lorelle VanFossen on the Blog Herald
• Jack of All Blogs
• Google Tutor

The idea behind the nofollow technique was to take away all the “link juice” comment spammers wanted, thus encouraging them to stop spamming. Google introduced the nofollow tag to discourage comment spam from flooding their search indexes, and blogging programs added it to avoid being penalized and jump on the anti-comment spam bandwagon. WordPress and many blogging programs and forums added a nofollow by default for all links within comment areas. This instructed search engines not to follow the link as they crawled the page, taking away the credit search engine page rank gives to incoming and outgoing links. Recently, while late to the party, in an effort to discourage comment spam, Wikipedia has added nofollow to their outgoing links.

The argument against rel=nofollow basically revolves around the idea that Google is penalizing even the legitimate bloggers and commenters (e.g., if nofollow is automatically enabled on blog software), and that spammers still keep on spamming.

Here’s one of the sites that’s actively advocating against nofollow: No Nofollow. Here are 11 reasons why nofollow is not effective, and expanded explanations on these (and 5 more).

Do you think it’s time to retire rel=nofollow? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Why didn’t I think of that before?

Anyway, what brought me to this realization is a recent issue of a lawsuit threat because a blog ranks higher than a business site for a Google search. Search Engine Journal has the skinny.

An online shoe store owner is threatening to sue a blogger Dean Hunt (DeanHunt.com) unless the blogger ‘lowers his Google ranking” for a keyword phrase that the store owner feels he deserves.
...

I have been running the site for over two years and we have been ranked very highly for the search term [edited].

On Thursday morning I checked our google positions and your site is now above us for this term. I haev checked your blog and it has nothing to do with [edited], so I think it would be best all round if you remove your blog from google for this search term.

Please understand that we make our living from this, and you are just writing a blog that has nothing to do with [edited].

If you do not remove yourself from google for this search, then I will call them myself and have you removed.

...

You have to understand Dean that an online business should be higher in Google than a blog.

Don’t forget that Google is a business as well, they obviously make more money from other businesses than they do from blogs, so it is in their interest that I am higher than you for certain searches.

I have also contacted my lawyer about this issue, so you should expect a letter in the post very soon.

Wow. That’s stupid, with a capital S! (That makes it Stupid, then.)

This is why I often advocate the use of blogs by businesses and companies. It helps with the image and helps boost search rankings, as well. “BLOG” standing for “better listings on Google” is very appropriate, don’t you think?

I dread the day the owners of racoma.com come knocking on my door demanding I de-optimize my blog for my surname. Or rather, I think I should look forward to that day. Maybe I can charge a gazillion bucks for racoma.net and racoma.com.ph.

Here’s one of the things I’ve been working on lately:

Isulong SEOPH

Let’s see if the J Spot still has that PR magic.

My alter-ego, the J Spotter, is now up one Google pagerank. Or at least that’s what the Blogflux PR indicator tells me. I wonder how this could’ve happened. I don’t think Google re-indexing right now.

Anyway, I’m getting a lot of hits from the search engines for queries on Oblation Run. I’m quite surprised the site’s now the first result in the Google SERP for the keyword.

That’s gonna snag a lot of, err, people interested in seeing naked men.

Update: Oops. Looks like blogflux had a glitch in displaying the PR 5 estimate. The site’s actually still PR 4.

Taking the cue from Yuga, I tweaked the settings on the item pages here on the J Spot and over at the J Spotter to display the actual post title before the site title in the