phil ringnalda

Sure, Answers.com blows away every other reference site, with a clean display of dictionary, thesaurus, specialized dictionary, Wikipedia, and translation results, with cruft-free URLs for easy linking (anything is at http://www.answers.com/anything, nothing to remember) as well as copy-and-paste HTML for fancier links one click away from anything, an RSS feed of “Today’s Highlights” to keep you interested in them, along with a program you can install to access them from any other program, that I don’t use, and a Firefox search plugin I use constantly. But that’s not what I want to talk about…

Maybe it’s just because I don’t spend much time on the commercial web, but I’m surprised by how little use of rel=”nofollow” I’m seeing (in blinking lime) on non-blog, non-wiki sites. It seemed like such an obvious tool to use, to micro-manage how you transfer PageRank within your site and to other people. However, Answers.com is doing a great job of showing how to use it to their advantage. Every page of answers that includes dictionary and thesaurus results is apparently required to link to Houghton Mifflin Company, and link it does, with nofollow. Answers from Wikipedia link to Wikipedia, and also include a pro forma link to the GNU Free Documentation License, nofollowed. Because they are generous, goodhearted folks with the best interests of their users always foremost in the every action, they link to search results for your query, including image and news searches, Technorati, and Amazon searches. Because they aren’t foolish enough to push the competition’s results page higher than their own if they don’t have to, those links are all nofollowed. Every single page links to their privacy policy and terms of use, but because having a high-ranking page for “terms of use” just means people too cheap to pay for a lawyer will steal yours, they’re nofollowed. All in all, an outstanding example of how to use rel="nofollow" for the one thing it’s really good at, moving PageRank only where you want it moved.