Does anyone remember that thing a year or two ago where bloggers invented a sort of “negative link”, so that you could link to a site you depised, like martinlutherking.org, but put a little notice in the link telling Google that the link was NOT a vote of confidence but merely a convenient way to let readers get there so they too could despise it?
I can’t remember what words they used for the conversation so I can’t find it anywhere – I only remember it didn’t actually work. Anyone remember more?
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i1277
That woould be rel=”nofollow”: “Typical use cases include links created by 3rd party commenters on blogs, or links the author wishes to point to, but avoid endorsing.”
It has been criticised, but according to Google it works the way you want it to.
Alfred Thompson
There is some detail and discussion of the nofollow tag at Wikipedia – Nofollow
As far as I know all of the major search engines recognize it.
Jeremy
rel=”nofollow” is also a microformat specification.
Norman Hanscombe
An excellent idea. The only problem remaining is how to have more bloggers aware of what deserves to be linked and what doesn’t; but in a world where so many believe “The X Files” is a documentary, that could be far more difficult.