December 11, 2007

posted by Frank Pasquale

I wouldn't be surprised if Google and others adopt something like this. It's not dissimilar to what Digg and its ilk attempt to do. But even a negative ranking will draw attention - like a car crash or a shock meme.

Frank,

There is something like this. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

From the wikipedia page for nofollow, it was introduced in 2005, and many blog tools quickly adopted it.
View Source on this very web page. You'll see that this blog is already using the nofollow tag!

The main aim of nofollow was to accomodate user comments, which were increasingly seeing spam in an attempt to boost SEO. But the nofollow simply works against ordinary users as well: If I link to articles I've written in the comments here, I am unfairly boosting my own website's SEO.

(Conversely: if you as a blogger/publisher find something interesting in the comments, and you want to boost its Google rank, you should write a new post to truly signify endorsement. See NetProps for some thoughts about linking dynamics. :-)

Bear in mind that del.icio.us was explicitly designed a shared intelligence service, and yet, when I last asked him, Josh Schachter was uninterested in why a "neg" bookmark would be useful. (While digg is has only pos/neg, and no other adjectives.)

Grant that HTML editing tools don't all make it apparent to the user. If you want to hack a nofollow (in such a way to make it explicit to the user that you are not giving any PageRank), you can do so by constructing a link like this (which goes to a page explaining the "Google Redirect Notice".)

Also, I might check with the SEO community whether Google uses URL references from non-HTML sources in PageRank calculations. Maybe journals should reconsider having PDF-only output! ... but then again, if a journal article is referencing a URL, it's probably well known.

Not sure this is necessary. I take the point that sometimes people link because they disagree with a post and are arguing against it. (And there are already 2 defences here: the link's context (for humans) and nofollow (for bots).)

But if I don't like a site, as a rule I won't link to it. There's a virtually unlimited amount of stuff out there on the web; I'll read (and link to) the bits of it I like. This is (or course) essentially why Google works and is tied to the point you made earlier:

[M]any individuals' perceptions are locked into "schemas" that lead them to discount information that contradicts their worldview and credit that which reinforces it.

This may be the difference between Digg and del.icio.us. Items in Digg are added to a linear list - there is no context or means to weight their relative importance initially, so voting buttons must be supplied. In contrast, a del.icio.us link forms part of a web; the more links it has, the greater its value.

Of course this argument doesn't hold in cases where the amount of available information is limited (such as Westlaw?), and it isn't always possible to substitute a bad source for a better one.

Seem remotely plausible?

PS When SEOmoz discussed bad practices a while ago, they linked to an offending site thus: bad site (link condom applied). Made me smile.

Do we really need a technological way to register our dissent with something? Isn't just disagreeing with it by arguing against it in writing enough? I fear also that this could lead to blacklisting: hey, let's gather a lot of red flag links to National Review! That'll show 'em how much we disapprove of their message.

Also, if you cared about something enough to link to it and write about it, then it deserves its popularity. People can decide for themselves whether they like it or not, without technologically-imposed opinion enforcement. This strikes me as similar to building copyright into music via DRM. It's opinion DRM.

Drew,

You missed the premise here. Google's PageRank algorithm assumes that each hyperlink is a positive vote. But these are vastly different purposes. Web writers had reason to link (enabling the reader to go directly to the resource) long before PageRank was invented.

It's as if you have made the decision to reside in a particular city, and a local planner were to include the statistic of your residency (and many others) to justify taking public dollars for a baseball stadium.

The problem that Frank wishes to solve has partially been solved through the nofollow tag.

Jon

Jon - I get the premise, I just don't think it's necessary. PageRank doesn't care about "positive" or "negative" votes, it cares about links. In my view, if something is worth being discussed negatively, it's worth whatever page ranking results.

I believe that you can use a redirect site such as TinyUrl to mask the offending site that you want to link so, thereby both linking to them and not giving them any Google pagerank. I did that today in this post:

Personal Injury Lawyer, Ryan Bradley, Using Blog for Blatant Solicitation

Drew-- Again, you are mistaken. PageRank *does* distinguish between nofollow and regular links. Thanks to nofollow, publishers are aim to control whether user-posted links affect PageRank.

Negative links are a different manner. They probably will not be recognized by PageRank anytime soon. But a dissenting link could be valuable for conversation aggregators.