I have the greatest respect in the world for David Weinberger. In a post today, he was advocating use of the nofollow tag when pointing to websites and when we don’t want Google to count the reference as a link (and thus boost their Google rank).

This has been a hot issue on and off in the Philippine blogoshpere, particularly with Sassy Lawyer.

I disagree with a lot of people on this and feel that if it’s worth pointing to a site in your post, it’s worth Google’s attention.

I’m trying to engage David in a quick conversation on this point in the comments to his post. Here’s the exchange so far:

I still don’t understand the purpose of nofollow, nor the implied concept that links are votes. If I were a white supremacist, I’d like to be able to find that site through Google.

What if the tables were turned and the masses linked to such sites only - then I couldn’t find the “legit” (whatever that might mean) sites through Google.

Posted by: Nick Nichols | April 11, 2006 08:52 PM

Nick, as I suspect you know, Google counts how many times a page is linked to when assigning a relevancy ranking to it. By putting in the nofollow tag, you’re telling Google not to count your page as giving the linked-to page more weight. (If I’m missing your point, I apologize preemptively.)

Posted by: David Weinberger | April 11, 2006 11:55 PM

Yeah. Let’s say a certain website’s point-of-view is pervasively deprecated in our society. Does that then mean that we should not allow (through aggressive use of nofollow tags) it’s being easily found via a high Google rank?

I say, let it be found and judged for what it is. The alternative is for all currently unpopular POVs to be difficult to find.

Posted by: Nick Nichols | April 12, 2006 02:53 AM