In another example of nofollow gone stupid, Google Video homepage has decided to nofollow all its links, with the exception of the ones to its advertising partners videos. Check out the screen shot below, all the links to AOL are direct. The other links that are not nofollowed go to pages inside Google Video and are video’s for partners, I can only speculate that they are trying to funnel page rank to those internal pages.
So there you have it.. Google Video trying to game the other engines through the improper use of nofollow on its paid links.
All the links in red are nofollow links.
//edited layout
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| Filed under: Misc — Scott @ January 26, 2007 11:41 am |
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And yes the internal links are followed here is acopy of the robots.txt at the time I published this.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /videosearch?
Disallow: /videofeed?
Disallow: /videopreview?
Disallow: /videopreviewbig?
Disallow: /videoprograminfo?
Disallow: /videorandom
Disallow: /videolineup
Disallow: /downloadgvp
And there were no meta tags preventing indexing or following on the page.
[...] Asi parece según comentan en WebProfessor, que dice que Goole Video tiene todos sus enlaces salientes configurados con NOFOLLOW, salvo aquellos que van a los videos de sus partners publicitarios. [...]
[...] Screenshots and more info at : Google Video selling Page Rank [...]
Google needs to put a video results onebox if they aren’t videos will receive no pagerank.
Trey I have to disagree.
The problem is in the existance of nofollow. It pressumes that its anyones business but the webmasters as to why they linked to a site.
Hi Scott, thanks for mentioning this. I asked a Google Video person what was up, and it wasn’t deliberate. The links that you noticed are generated by a completely separate code path (because those links are generated via a different mechanism), and it was an oversight that the nofollow was put in one branch of the code path and not the other branch.
I sent an email asking about your post to the Video team about 11 p.m. last night (I was catching up on email), and the Video team had a changelist to fix it ready by this morning. The change will go out in the normal course of pushing out a new binary program, which should be within about week. The Video team offered to do an off-cycle/emergency push of the binary to fix this in a faster-than-a-week time frame, but my thinking was that as long as the change happened to fix the bug within a few days, it would be fine to stay with the normal push schedule.
P.S. Thanks for pointing this out. I’m leaving my email in the contact field if you want to follow up. If you want to get me some contact info, I can also ask Adam Lasnik to send some schwag to say thanks for noticing this and bringing it to our attention.
[...] So, given the fact that Google has discussed this issue several times, you’d think they’d be clear on it. However, as the Web Professor discovered earlier this week, that’s not quite the case. [...]
Matt I honestly don’t care if Google was or is trying to manipulate anything. My true issue is with the extension of nofollow into things it was never intended for. The nofollow issue has become a proxy war. A proxy war against businesses right to privacy from search engines.
The use of nofollow makes the search engines a sort of “super user”. A super user that I tell my business relationships to while hiding that information from my regular users. That special treatment does a disservice to real users, theinternet in general, and the search engines.
How does it do all that harm? It means that I am treating real users as second class citizens that are not privy to the knowledge I share with you, the search engine. The internet is harmed because it generates a notion of “better safe than sorry” causing people to stop linking in a normal and healthy ways. Lastly it harms engines in two ways. First by eroding our trust in Google after repeated threats of “use it or no PR passing”. Second by corrupting the data in the index with input from users who don’t understand how to use it and the change in linking patterns of those users due to the effects of nofollows existence.
I will not let a search engine impose itself as a super user on my sites. Search engines are simply a users nothing more and I decide what my users get and don’t get. We willingly share so much data with you already Matt, the nofollow bit is just going to far. I request that Google stop pushing its nofollow agenda and we all move on to more productive things.
[...] Screenshots and more info at : Google Video selling Page Rank [Read more →] [...]
[...] while ago I noticed something amiss with the links on the Google Video site. Matt and Adam sent me a Google t shirt, a lava lamp, and really cool glowing google pen for [...]
[...] is a mistake Google has made many times in the [...]
[...] Wall, writes in his blog, how Google has been caught repeatedly selling high PageRank links. See here and here. Google has been cross promoting products with high PR links from its [...]
Google is like the US Government…They Do what they want whenver they want…