I started writing something critical about Google’s “nofollow” proposal, which I felt alone in not being enamored with, but I then ran across Matthew Skala’s excellent post. He says it all, and says it well. Here are Matthew’s main complaints about “nofollow”:
- Requires 99.9% participation to work
- Google is smart, page authors are stupid
- Editing user-entered data is a bad thing
- Should be inside a namespace
- Should mark text, not links
- Google can trust itself,can’t trust page authors
He concludes as follows:
I’m really concerned about anything that is sold on a pretext nobody can argue with. Nobody can speak out against fighting spam, just like nobody can speak out against fighting child pornography and nobody can speak out against fighting terrorism. So any time we’re told that something requires our cooperation in order to fight spam, child pornography, or terrorism, we had better ask ourselves, “Will this really fight the evil thing?” and “What other goals would our participation give comfort to?”
Full disclosure: For now, I have decided not to install the “nofollow” MT plug-in on this site.
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