SEO, marketing and programming

When the PageRank algo was first invented, it was almost perfect: it used the semantic structure of the web, counting links as votes. Google was a small company that nobody knew of, and nobody cared about.

But now, when Google gives many sites 50-70% of their traffic, the incentives to cheat the algos are bigger than ever. It is very much like physics: you cannot measure a system without changing its state. Same thing happened here: now, every effort is not spent on linking to useful sites, but linking to sites that you have an interest in linking to.

Pragramtic webmasters put rel=”nofollow” on all “useful” links (that are intended for visitors), and only leave some sold or links to their own pages without the nofollow property. This works short-term, but in the long term it will destroy the semantic structure and, as a result, Google will have to invent a new way of ranking websites. So in the long term, this strategy won’t work.

Footnote: this should not be interpreted in any way that I dislike the “nofollow” param or that I don’t use it myself. These are just my reflections=)