Google’s NoFollow Tag is a Joke

Over this weekend I noticed that my Page Rank on Google shot up to PR8 from PR3 for about an hour. I thought perhaps Google had decided to retract their penalty for not no-following some of my links but I’m back at PR3 so perhaps they haven’t.

Nat Arem first picked up on the fact that online poker affiliated sites were getting pretty harshly penalized for either buying or selling links. I am guilty of having sold links. But I never considered myself a Google criminal. Sure I let someone buy a text ad in my sidebar but it was clearly labelled and I really didn’t think it was too far different than selling a graphic banner ad. Seriously, I didn’t really feel I was in the business of scamming Google. I simply was monetizing my website.

But what Google wants is for those ads to have rel=nofollow in the link code so that the Google search engine knows not to follow the link. The origin of this link attribute is from when blogs were being spammed in their comments with links to everything from gambling sites to penis enlargement offers. Almost overnight, blogs were getting slammed with thousands of bogus comments. The more popular your blog was the more spam it would get. Google created this tag as a way to remove the incentive for spammers to spam blogs. If Google wasn’t going to follow the links anyway then why even bother?

But a funny thing happened. The blog spammers continued to spam and Google started using the nofollow attribute in a way completely different from how it was originally marketed. To say that the nofollow tag has been a failure in terms of what its original goal was would be an understatement. I still get thousands of auto-generated comments that I have to filter out.

In a way, the shift in how they use the nofollow attribute is a testament to Google’s own failure to properly index the internet. They basically said that instead of improving their ranking algorithm to be able to tell the difference between advertising and content they would simply force website owners to use this tag attribute that they created to stop comment spam to tell Google what’s paid for and what isn’t.

It’s almost humorous in a way that Google created a ranking system based on how many incoming links a site receives but didn’t think about the implications and incentives this would create. If you really think about it Google created comment spam. People spam blogs in the hopes that more links to their site will make them more popular. Then Google comes up with this nofollow tag which fails miserably and so then Google retaliates against an incentive system that Google itself created and starts to penalize people who sell or buy these links.

But again, what incentive does that create? Now I’m scared to link to anybody without the nofollow attribute for fear that Google might classify the link as paid for and punish me. Wikipedia, which Google clearly considers god on all topics and ranks first if they have anything even remotely connected to the subject of the search, put nofollow on all of their outbound links. So, if the top authority on a topic links to your content as a source of information for their content you get zero Google love. Isn’t that the antithesis of what Google’s whole links infer credibility scoring algorithm was supposed to accomplish?

Google has some very, very smart people working for them but none of them seem to have passed Econ 101 where they teach the law of unintended consequences. Every time Google rewards a certain type of behaviour people are going to do what Google rewards. And yes, unsavoury people are going to try to scam the system. That’s just a fact of life and Google needs to understand that and stop trying to penalize people who react to the incentives that they themselves create.

So yes, I was a criminal in Google’s eyes. I sold a couple of links for what was basically enough to pay my hosting bill and buy a beer. For that Google decided to cut my traffic in half despite the fact that I’m what many consider to be an authoritative site. My – completely unpaid – backlinks number in the thousands and even PokerStars sends their customers to my site to read my arguments on why online poker is not rigged.

Meanwhile link buying and selling continues. In fact, since pulling the text ads I’ve been approached no less than four times by people wanting to purchase ads. And as others have recently noted, some of the biggest link buyers out there haven’t received any penalty at all.

So in the end, again, we’re left with another failed policy from Google. They’ve penalized authoritative sites and haven’t stopped any of the link buying and selling. Bravo Google!