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Will Digg follow by going nofollow?
Neil over at Pronet Advertising has a post today discussing how a service called MarketWire appears to be spamming Digg by posting over 300 of their press releases on Digg. Not one hit the home page.
Last week, Wikipedia changed their external links to all use the microformat "nofollow" so that all outbound links carry no search engine optimization weight. So far it appears to be the right thing to do.
So my question is… should Digg do the same thing? When I look at the upcoming stories in Tech News (the biggest category), the posts come in like hot cakes. Besides the fact that so many are duplicates, how many are there for the sole purpose of gaining more inbound links.
I think going nofollow may remove a good bit of the "corporate" spam we see on Digg. Will people still spam Digg in the hopes of hitting the home page? Yep. But it may help deter users who are using Digg for the sole purpose of gaining inbound link traction.
Their is a definite increase in Web 2.0 sites using the no follow.
SEO will simply have to try a different tactic I suppose.
Digg has users. Spammers do not.
They can do whatever they want for now. I say yes, go for it.
You wish! Wikipedia is thriving, but their relnofollow is stupid because it means that they don’t promote whatever legitimate sites are used, and that means Google results will be flawed because the pagerank bonus they recieved will be lost and google spammers who probably have found other sites to use to spam their sites pagerank will increase to the top, and those other sites will fall.
Digg would be stupid to use rel=nofollow, because digg users are one shot visitors – they read, they use, they take, the bandwidth is used-and ads are blocked, so no real profit comes from Digg and legitimate sites from Digg see the PR with the traffic as a bonus, and if Digg takes that way – all that leaves is a couple of comments in your blog, and wasted bandwidth.
Not to mention, what about the fact that Digg’s norel sometimes help sites that are virtually undiscovered get some pagerank. It helps break the sandbox, granted I remember a day when there was no (yes NO) spam in the digg upcoming list..but hey, the Digg voting system works and keeps most spam out.
Im sorry but wiki is a dying dinosaur and not having outbound links with anchor tags is just another reason why wiki will die like dmoz is.
Nobody uses wikipedia anymore…
On the contrary, many people still rely on wikipedia to gather information, albeit you cannot really use wikipedia as authoritative source, but it is the next best thing to help you out in a jam.
Actually, I use Wikipedia all the time and use Digg once every two months.
DIGG has a positive effect. People started to create good and interesting content even if they only want links. But if the nofollow rule will be use a lot of people will abandon Digg. So that’s a NO NO.
I think Wiki is playing dirty and the nofollow has more to do with its own search product coming out.
I am really suprised Digg haven’t already done this. Have they done it for the comments?
A lot of people(SPAMMERS) will abandon Digg.
Oh dear, what a shame, never mind.
Google Page Rank is dead…..
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060510-123802
Google is “supposed” to rank pages using 200 quality signals but that seems
to be not working, all google academic PhD’s are worthless against much more
intelligent entrepreneurs.
It is obvious that google algorithms has miserably failed, means google
stock price will fall soon, because the whole premise of google is it
can “algorithmically rank pages” there by “eliminating human review”.
Fasten you seat belt for web 2.0 crash……..
I agree, I think wikipedia (as a nonprofit) will be exploited in anyway possible to help out wikia (Jimbo Wale’s for profit company). I mean any nonprofit is free to throw a link to anyone, and in this case, that link could be worth millions.
Digg officially sucks, they’re fostered a very bad relationship with their top users – which is why many left to Netscape. They do in fact censor submissions, and they’ve recently banned a huge list of urls including many sites that were legitimate sites.
They’ve even banned sites that criticize Digg. I think they’re gaining too much power overall in terms of SERPs , and they need some healthy completion.
There is no wrong on promoting your ideas on the net as long as you have some sensible ideas to add. Take me for example. I do read a lot of article and news about search engine optimization services and tools and add useful ideas (as far as i believe) once I think thats what they are. People who post ideas and comments are people who would like to contribute spare time to share ideas and knowledge. thats why I think that sites that do not respect that will be neglected as time goes by.One who contribute should have recognition at least. I don’t see any reasons why not. Spammers are those who do no read the article or just post empty repies / automated ones having one sole purpose in mind.
Eitan Yariv
Seo Guide
I guess I have a stupid question, but do forums and message boards such as this generally use the “nofollow” tag? If so, is this simply to keep out spammers. Also, can Google tell the difference between, say a response to a story that you post on Gizmodo where you include your url and a url that is embedded in the story itself (for example the story is actually about your url or mentions your site and links to it)? Thanks.
John
I don’t think going nofollow will stop people from trying to game the system. Nor do I think it will stop the people who post the good content from posting either.
You want to get to page one of Digg for the tons of backlinks you’ll get from other sites, not digg.
I think digg probably will start using the nofollow, but I don’t put much faith in it stopping the spam.
I think a lot of digg spam is there more for the front page.
A link on the front page of digg can yield well over 1000 links to a site, regardless of whether the one digg link has a nofollow attribute or not. The prospect of that ALONE is enough to keep the spammers coming.
I personally don’t like the nofollow tags – i think people just moderate their blogs, but I see where it is effective.
I don’t think it will be in this case.
Digg is 99% outbound links, therefore making a link on it relatively useless to search engines besides the users who click what you’ve dugg.
J | sumolabs.com
I do use Wikipedia more than Digg.
Just my extra two cents here; nofollow just seems to stop people from pushing their own site’s google page rank. A legit site or not, posting a link on some place like wikipedia so that it will be indexed is kinda weak. Might as well remove the incentive to do so.
I used wikipedia to figure out what you meant by nofollow.
Spammers will continue to find new and exciting ways to spam. Then after a minute, they will be figured out and need to detour again. But, like roaches, if they want to they squirm their way in.