O’Reilly and Link Spam

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I’ve been making a conscious effort to make things more positive around here, but every so often something is going to get under my skin and get my hackles up. The bru-ha-ha over this O’Reilly link spam thing did it today.

Google Engineer Matt Cutts recommends the following:

As others have noted, if you’re going to sell text links that pass reputation/PageRank, the way to do it is to add rel=nofollow to those links.

Google’s view on this is quite close to Phil Ringnalda’s. Selling links muddies the quality of the web and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. The rel=nofollow attribute is the correct answer: any site can sell links, but a search engine will be able to tell that the source site is not vouching for the destination page.


Now Matt’s a smart guy I like him a lot and have a lot of respect for him, it’s not easy to step into the lion’s den on a daily basis and remain level headed. Looking at it from Google’s point of view the “nofollow” tag makes perfect sense, it allows them to separate paid endorsements from unsolicited ones. But there are two sides to every coin, so lets look at this from the advertisers perspective.

If you are a company and you pay for a celebrity endorsement you are borrowing/renting some of the respect that celebrity has earned. When Michael Jordan advertised for Hanes underwear did he carry a big sign saying “Hey I really don’t trust a word Hanes says about it’s underwear”? Should Hanes have been forced to tolerate such behavior? So why on earth should online advertisers be forced to undergo that level of denigration. I’m all for clearly labeling advertising as advertising, but let’s live in the real world, okay.

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