Why eBay and Wikipedia rule Google's SERPs

It's hard to find an obscure search query like [artificial link] which doesn't deliver eBay spam or a Wikipedia stub within the first few results at Google. Although both Wikipedia and eBay are large sites, the Web is huge, so two that different sites shouldn't dominate the SERPs for that many topics. Hence it's safe to say that many nicely ranked search results at Googledia, pulled from eBaydia, are plain artificial positioned non-results.

Curious why my beloved search engine fails so badly, I borrowed a Google-savvy spy from GHN and sent him to Mountain View to uncover the eBaydia ranking secrets. He came back with lots of pay-dirt scraped from DVDs in the safe of building 43. Before I sold Google's ranking algo to Ask (the price Yahoo! and MSN offered was laughable), I figured out why Googledia prefers eBaydia from comments in the source code. Here is the unbelievable story of a miserable failure:

When Yahoo! launched Mindset, Larry Page and Sergey Brin threw chairs out of anger because Google wasn't able to accomplish such a simple task. The engineers, eager to fulfill their founder's wishes asap, tried to integrate mindset-functionality without changing Google's fascinating simple search interface (that means without a shopping/research slider). Personalized search still lived in the labs, but provided a somewhat suitable API (mega beta): scanSearchersBrainForContext([search query]). Not knowing that this function of personalized search polls a nano-bugging-device (pre alpha) which Google had not yet released nor implemented into any searcher's brain at this time, they made use of that piece of experimental code to evaluate the search query's context. Since the method always returned "false", though they had to deliver results quickly, they made up some return values to test their algo tweaks:

/* debug - praying S&L don't throw more chairs */
if (scanSearchersBrainForContext($searchQuery) === false) then {
$contextShopping = "%ebay%";
$contextResearch = "%wikipedia%";
$context = both($contextShopping, $contextResearch);
}
else {[pretty complex algo])

This worked fine and found its way into the ranking algo under time pressure. The result is that with each and every search query where a page from eBay and/or Wikipedia is in the raw result set, those get a ranking boost. Sergey was happy because eBay is generally listed on page #1, and Larry likes the Wikipedia results on the first SERP. Tell me why the heck should the engineers comment out these made up return values? No engineer on this planet likes flying chairs, especially not in his office.


PS: Some SEOs push Wikipedia stubs too.

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Which Sebastian Foss is a spammer?

Obviously pissed by my post Fraud from the desk of Sebastian Foss, Sebastian Foss sent this email to Smart-IT-Consulting.com:

Remove your insults from your blog about my products and sites... as you may know promote-biz.net is not registered to my name or my company.. just look it up in some whois service. This is some spammer who took my software and is now selling it on his spammer websites. Im only selling my programs under their original .com domains and you did not receive any email from me since im only using doube-optin lists.

You may not know it - but insulting persons and spreading lies is under penalty.

Sebastian Foss
Sebastian Foss e-trinity Marketing Inc.
sebastian@etrinity-mail.com

Well, that's my personal blog, and I've a professional opinion about the software Sebastian Foss sells, more on that later. It's public knowledge that spammers do register domains under several entities to obfuscate their activities. I'm not a fed, and I'm not willing to track down each and every multiple respectively virtual personality of a spammer, so I admit that there's at least a slight possibility that the Sebastian Foss spamming my inbox from promote-biz.net is not the Sebastian Foss who wrote and sells the software promoted by the email spammer Sebastian Foss. Since I still receive email spam from the desk of Sebastian Foss at promote-biz.net, I think there's no doubt that this Sebastian Foss is a spammer. Well, Sebastian Foss himself calls him a spammer, and so do I. Confused? So am I. I'll update my other post to reflect that.

Now that we've covered the legal stuff, lets look at the software from the desk of Sebastian Foss.

• Blog Blaster claims to submit "ads" to 2,000,000 sites. Translation: Blog Blaster automatically submits promotional comments to 2 million blogs. The common description of this kind of "advertising" is comment spam.
  Sebastian Foss tells us that "Blog Blaster will automatically create thousands of links to your website - which will rank your website in a top 10 position!". The common description of this link building technique is link spam.
  The sales pitch signed by Sebastian Foss explains "I used it [Blog Blaster] to promote my other website called ezinebroadcast.com and Blog Blaster produced thousands of links to ezinebroadcast.com - resulting in a #1 position in Google for the term "ezine advertising service". So I understand that Sebastian Foss admits that he is a comment spammer and a link spammer.
  I'd like to see the written permissions of 2,000,000 bloggers allowing Sebastian Foss and his customers to spam their blogs: "Advertising using Blog Blaster is 100% SPAM FREE advertising! You will never be accused of spamming. Your ads are submitted to blogs whose owners have agreed to receive your ads." Laughable, and obviously a lie. Did Sebastian Foss remember that "spreading lies is under penalty"? Take care, Sebastian Foss!


• Feed Blaster with a very similar sales pitch aims to create the term feed spam. Also, it seems that FeedBlaster™ is a registered trademark of DigitalGrit Inc. And I don't think that Microsoft, Sun and IBM are happy to spot their logos on Sebastian Foss' site e-trinity Internetmarketing GmbH


• The Money License System aka Google Cash Machine seems to slip through a legal loophole. May be it's not explicit illegal to sell software build to to trick Google Adwords respectively AdSense or ClickBank, but using it will result in account terminations and AFAIK legal actions too.


• Instant Booster claims to spam search engines, and it does, according to many reports. The common term applied to those techniques is web spam.

All these domains (and there are countless more sites selling similar scams from the desk of Sebastian Foss) are registered by Sebastian Foss respectively his companies e-trinity Internetmarketing GmbH or e-trinity Marketing Inc.

He's in the business of newsgroup spam, search engine spam, comment spam ... probably there's no target left out. Searching for Sebastian Foss scam and similar search terms leads to tons of rip-off reports.

He's even too lazy to rephrase his sales pitches, click a few of the links provided above, then search for quoted phrases you saw on every sales pitch to get the big picture. All that may be legal in Germany, I couldn't care less, but it's not legit. Creating and selling software for the sole purpose of spamming makes the software vendor a spammer. And he's proud of it. He openly admits that he uses his software to spam blogs, search engines, newsgroups and whatever. He may make use of affiliates and virtual entities who send out the email spam, perhaps he got screwed by a chinese copycat selling his software via email spam, but is that relevant when the product itself is spammy?

What do you think, is every instance of Sebastian Foss a spammer? Feel free to vote in the comments.


Update 08/01/2007 Here is the next email from the desk of Sebastian Foss:

Hi,
thanks for the changes on your blog entry - however like i mentioned if you look up the domains which were advertised in the spam mails you will notice that they are not registered to me or my company. You can also see that visiting the sites you will see some guy took my products and is selling them for a lower price on his own websites where he is also copying all of my graphic files. The german police told me that they are receiving spam from your forms and that it goes directly to their trash... however please remove your entries about me from your blog - There is no sense in me selling my own products for a lower price on some cheap, stolen websites - if that would make sense then why do i have my own .com domains for my products ? I just want to make clear that im not sending out any spam mails - please get back to me.

Thanks,
Sebastian

Sebastian Foss
e-trinity Internetmarketing GmbH
sebastian@etrinity-mail.com

It deserves just a short reply:

It makes perfect sense to have an offshore clone in China selling the same outdated and pretty much questionable stuff a little cheaper. This clone can do that because first there's next to no costs like taxes and so on, and second he does it per spamming my inbox on a daily base, hence probably he sells a lot of the 'borrowed' stuff. Whether or not the multiple Sebastian Fosses are the same natural person is not my problem. I claim nothing but leave it up to you dear reader's speculation, common sense, and probability calculation.

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Blogger abuses rel-nofollow due to ignorance

I had planned a full upgrade of this blog to the newest blogger version this weekend. The one and only reason to do the upgrade was the idea that I perhaps could disable the auto-nofollow functionality in the comments. Well, what I found was a way to dofollow the author's link by editing the <dl id='comments-block'> block, but I couldn't figure out how to disable the auto-nofollow in embedded links.

Considering the hassles of converting all the template hacks into the new format, and the risk of most probably losing the ability to edit code my way, I decided to stick with the old template. It just makes no sense for me to dofollow the author's link, when a comment author's links within the content get nofollow'ed automatically. Andy Beard and others will hate me now, so let me explain why I don't move this blog to my own domain using a not that insane software like WordPress.

• I own respectively author on various WordPress blogs. Google's time to index for posts and updates from this blogspot thingy is 2-3 hours (Web search, not blog search). My Wordpress blogs, even with higher PageRank, suffer from a way longer time to index.
• I can't afford the time to convert and redirect 150 posts to another blog.
• I hope that Google/Blogger can implement reasonable change requests (most probably that's just wishful thinking).

That said, WordPress is a way better software than Blogger. I'll have to move this blog if Blogger is not able to fulfill at least my basic needs. I'll explain below why I think that Blogger lacks any understanding of the rel-nofollow semantics. In fact, they throw nofollow crap on everything they get a hand on. It seems to me that they won't stop jeopardizing the integrity of the Blogosphere (at least where they control the linkage) until they get bashed really hard by a Googler who understands what rel-nofollow is all about. I nominate Matt Cutts, who invented and evolved it, and who does not tolerate BS.

So here is my wishlist. I want (regardless of the template type!)

• A checkbox "apply rel=nofollow to comment author links"
• A checkbox "apply rel=nofollow to links within comment text"
• To edit comments, for example to nofollow links myself, or to remove offensive language
• A checkbox "apply rel=nofollow to links to label/search pages"
• A checkbox "apply a robots meta tag 'noindex,follow' to label/search pages"
• A checkbox "apply rel=nofollow to links to archive pages"
• A checkbox "apply a robots meta tag 'noindex,follow' to archive pages"
• A checkbox "apply rel=nofollow to backlink listings"

As for the comments functionality, I'd understand when these options get disabled when comment moderation is set to off.

And here are the nofollow-bullshit examples.

• When comment moderation and captchas are activated, why are comment author links as well as links within the comments nofollow'ed? Does blogger think their bloggers are minor retards? I mean, when I approve a comment, then I do vouch for it. But wait! I can't edit the comment, so a low-life link might slip through. Ok, then let me edit the comments.


• When I've submitted a comment, the link to the post is nofollowed. This page belongs to the blog, so why the fudge does Blogger nofollow navigational links? And if it makes sense for a weird reason not understandable by a simple webmaster like me, why is the link to the blog's main page as well as the link to the post one line below not nofollow'ed? Linking to the same URL with and without rel-nofollow on the same page deserves a bullshit award.


• On my dashbord Blogger features a few blogs as "Blogs Of Note", all links nofollow'ed. These are blogs recommended by the Blogger crew. That means they have reviewed them and the links are clearly editorial content. They're proud of it: "we've done a pretty good job of publishing a new one each day". Blogger's very own Blogs Of Note blog does not nofollow the links, and that's correct.
  
  So why the heck are these recommended blogs nofollow'ed on the dashboard?


• Blogger inserted robots meta tags "nofollow,noindex" on each and every blog hosted outside the controlled blogspot.com domain earlier this year.


• Blogger inserted robots meta tags "nofollow,noindex" on Google blogs a few days ago.

If Blogger's recommendation "Check google.com. (Also good for searching.)" is a honest one, why don't they invest a few minutes to educate themselves on rel-nofollow? I mean, it's a Google-block/avoid-indexing/ranking-thingy they use to prevent Google.com users from finding valuable contents hosted on their own domains. And they annoy me. And they insult their users. They shouldn't do that. That's not smart. That's not Google-ish.

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Danny Sullivan did not strip for Matt Cutts

Nope, this is not recycled news. I'm not referring to Matt asking Danny to strip off his business suit, although the video is really funny. I want to comment on something Matt didn't say recently, but promised to do soon (again).

Danny Sullivan stripped perfectly legit code from Search Engine Land because he was accused to be a spammer, although the CSS code in question is in no way deceitful.

StandardZilla slams poor Tamar just reporting a WebProWorld thread, but does an excellent job in explaining why image replacement is not search engine spam but a sound thing to do. Google's recently updated guidelines need to tell more clearly that optimizing for particular user agents is not considered deceitful cloaking per se. This would prevent Danny from stripping (code) not for Matt or Google but for lurid assclowns producing canards.

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Blasting mount email

I've moved 5k emails, mostly unread, from my inbox to a "swamped" folder. I hope a couple of new filters will help avoiding such drastic measures in the future. So if I owe you an answer: I apologize, please resend your message. Thanks.

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Fraud from the desk of Sebastian Foss

Frequently I receive emails from very angry people complaining about various "SEO tools" and "Money Making Software" delivered from the desk of Sebastian Foss (AdBlaster, Instant Booster, eZine blaster, Blog Blaster, Feed Blaster, Newsgroup Blaster, eBay Cash Machine, Doorway Page Generator, Google Cash Machine, and countless more scams), which got their sites banned or which just didn't work as promised, asking for a refund and demanding compensation. I'm sick of replying to all these emails to set the records straight, so here is the guy's address:

e-trinity Internetmarketing Ltd.
Sebastian Foss
Böhler Str.14
Lindlar, 51789, North Rhine-Westphalia
Germany [map]
Phone: +49 2266 478 230
Fax: +49 2266 478 197
email: sebastian@etrinity-mail.com

I suffer from his fraudulent and spammy activities too. I find his URLs in my referrer stats, I receive his email spam from the desk of Sebastian Foss, and people get mad on me because they assume I'm him just because I blog about SEO and Internet marketing.

Here is the last email spam I got from Sebastian Foss¹⁾ at promote-biz.net:Can you afford to lose 300,000 potential customers per year ? How would You like to divert 1000s of fresh, new visitors daily to Your web site or affiliate web site from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others At $0 cost to you...? Never seen before! Brand new for 2007! If you don't try this incredible software, you are just plain off your rocker. ...iNSTANT BOOSTER diverts 1000s of fresh, new visitors daily to Your web site or affiliate web site from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others at $0 cost to you! ...No matter what you are selling or offering -INTSANT BOOSTER will pull in hordes of potential customers to your website - instantly! ...Automatically Get 1000's of other High Ranking web sites eagerly linking to your web site no questions asked. ...your web site will quickly achieve Ultra High Link Popularity on the Major Search Engines ...you'll get 1000's of Highly Targeted visitors to your web site or affiliate web site overnight For full details please read the attached .html fileAnd here's the attached HTML file:<html> <head> <title>Loading page...</title> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;URL=http://www.promote-biz.net/mg/instantbooster/"> <script><br />url='http://www.promote-biz.net/mg/instantbooster/'; if(document.images) { top.location.replace(url); } else { top.location.href=http://www.promote-biz.net/mg/instantbooster/; } </script><br /></head> <body>Loading <a href=http://www.promote-biz.net/mg/instantbooster/>page</a>... </body> </html>A smart investigator can should be capable to assign this URL on promote-biz.net to e-trinity Internetmarketing Ltd., Sebastian Foss' company in Lindlar, Germany.

If you're sick of spam and scams from the desk of Sebastian Foss too, then turn him in. Last time I looked, sending out email spam is a crime in Germany. In case the spam report form below (courtesy of the german cops) doesn't work, here you go: Police Lindlar, Germany.
SPAM REPORT (yellow background = mandatory)

Your coordinates:

Surname:
Birth name:
First name:
Date of birth:
Place of birth:
Sex: femalemale
Street address:
Zip code:
City:
Phone#:
Mobile phone#:
eMail:

What to report?

Type or source of fraud:
Web site, forum, blog...
Usenet group
Chat room
Mail list
Spam email (UCE)
Other

Provide internet address (URL), IP address, channel, email-ID (email header), and other information useful to track down the issue:

Copy+paste the complete email headerDate:
Time:

Details (mandatory!)

Sebastian Foss sent me this email spam: [copy + paste the text of the email and mention attachments]

Witnesses (if any, provide names and addresses)

Perpetrator and site of crime:

Unknown:
International
Germany
Perp name:
Perp address:

Here's a tiny sample of domains related to or operated by Sebastian Foss, according to Rip Off Report "[one of] the biggest scam artist[s] on the Internet":
10-thousand-dollars.biz 101-website-traffic.com 2click.com auction-machine.com automatedriches.com automatic-mailer.com blog-blast.com blog-blaster.com cashcreation.com clickedcash.com dollarbuddy.biz etrinity.com feed-blast.com free-traffic-handbook.com hit-booster.com hitworkz.com income-builder.com income-machine.com incomeuniversity.com instant-booster.com megapromoter.com megawealthpackage.com minuteprofits.com money-license.com moneybank.com plugin-income.com press-blast.com promote-biz.net promotionpalace.com sebastianfoss.com seo-secret.com submit-it-easy.com ...

It doesn't hurt to link to this post with "Sebastian Foss" in the anchor text ;)

Update: I received a threat from Sebastian Foss, so I've edited this post (look for original text followed by changes). I'm not 100% certain which instance of "Sebastian Foss" sends out the email spam, but all known instances of Sebastian Foss are obviously spammers. More Information on the spammer Sebastian Foss and his clones respectively multiple/virtual personalities.

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No search, more fun: Netscape spamming Google

Google dislikes crawlable SERPs. But Google still indexes huge chunks of SERPs, and to make it worse, these disliked URLs sometimes rank above other useless webspam from Amazon, Ebay, and cohorts on the very first search result page.

For example Netscape is still flooding Google's search index with crap as per the quality guidelines, which clearly state:

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages [...] that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

Netscape.com lacks a robots.txt, but how many patterns does it need to identify these pages as SERPs? Next search.netscape.com has a robots.txt, but it lacks a Disallow: / directive, respectively Disallow's of all their scripts generating search results.

Is it that simple to get gazillions of useless autogenerated pages ranking at Google? Indeed. Following the Netscape precedent every assclown out there can buy a SE-script, can crawl the Web for a bunch of niche keywords, and will earn free Google traffic just because he has "forgotten" to upload a proper robots.txt file and Google isn't capable of detecting SERPs. I mean when they don't run a few tests with Netscape-SERPs, where's the point of an unenforced no-crawlable-SERPs policy?

I just found another interesting snippet in Google's quality guidelines:

If a site doesn't meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index.

I certainly will not miss 1,360,000 URLs from a spamming site ;)

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Yahoo! search going to torture Webmasters

According to Danny Yahoo! supports a multi-class nonsense called robots-nocontent tag. CRAP ALERT!

Can you senseless and cruel folks at Yahoo!-search imagine how many of my clients who'd like to use that feature have copied and pasted their pages? Do you've a clue how many sites out there don't make use of SSI, PHP or ASP includes, and how many sites never heard of dynamic content delivery, respectively how many sites can't use proper content delivery techniques because they've to deal with legacy systems and ancient business processes? Did you ask how common templated Web design is, and I mean the weird static variant, where a new page gets build from a randomly selected source page saved as new-page.html?

It's great that you came out with a bastardized copy of Google's somewhat hapless (in the sense of cluttering structured code) section targeting, because we dreadfully need that functionality across all engines. And I admit that your approach is a little better than AdSense section targeting because you don't mark payload by paydirt in comments. But why the heck did you design it that crappy? The unthoughtful draft of a microformat from what you've "stolen" that unfortunate idea didn't become a standard for very good reasons. Because it's crap. Assigning multiple class names to markup elements for the sole purpose of setting crawler directives is as crappy as inline style assignments.

Well, due to my zero-bullshit tolerance I'm somewhat upset, so I repeat: Yahoo's robots-nocontent class name is crap by design. Don't use it, boycott it, because if you make use of it you'll change gazillions of files for each and every proprietary syntax supported by a single search engine in the future. When the united search geeks can agree on flawed standards like rel-nofollow, they should be able to talk about a sensible evolvement of robots.txt.

There's a way easier solution, which doesn't require editing tons of source files, that is standardizing CSS-like syntax to assign crawler directives to existing classes and DOM-IDs. For example extent robots.txt syntax like:

A.advertising { rel: nofollow; } /* devalue aff links */

DIV.hMenu, TD#bNav { content:noindex; rel:nofollow; } /* make site wide links unsearchable */

Unsupported robots.txt syntax doesn't harm, proprietary attempts do harm!

Dear search engines, get together and define something useful, before each of you comes out with different half-baked workarounds like section targeting or robots-nocontent class values. Thanks!

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Categorizing posts with blogger (rant)

Google knows everything about AJAX. Why the heck can't I assign categories to old posts without hassles? "Edit posts - change number of listed posts - scoll down - edit - scoll down - choose/enter categories - publish - repeat" is just 7 full page reloads/actions too much. On a slow DSL connection this archaic procedure drives me nuts.

Dear readers, when you click on "Labels" most probably you won't find related posts :( I'm adding categories when I update an old post, but UI flaws hinder me to categorize the whole archive. Sorry.

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Better don't run a web server under Windows

IIS defaults can produce serious troubles with search engines. That's a common problem and not even all .nhs.uk (UK Government National
Health Service) admins have spotted it. I've alerted the Whipps Cross University Hospital but can't email all NHS sites suffering from IIS and lazy or uninformed webmasters. So here's the fix:

Create a server without subdomain domain.nhs.uk, then go to the "Home Directory" tab and click the option "Redirection to a URL". As "Redirect to" enter the destination, for example "http://www.domain.nhs.uk$S$Q", without a slash after ".uk" because the path ($S placeholder) begins with a slash. The $Q placeholder represents the query string. Next check "Exact URL entered above" and "Permanent redirection for this resource", and submit. Test the redirection with a suitable tool.

Now when a user enters a URL without the "www" prefix s/he gets the requested page from the canonical server name. Also search engine crawlers following non-canonical links like http://whippsx.nhs.uk/ will transmit the link love to the desired URL, and will index more pages instead of deleting them in their search indexes after a while because the server is not reachable. I'm not joking. Under some circumstances all or many www-URLs of pages referenced by relative links resolving to the non-existent server will get deleted in the search index after a couple of unsuccessfull attempts to fetch them without the www-prefix.

Hat tip to Robbo
Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) IIS National Health Service (NHS) UK

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Yahoo Pipes jeopardizes the integrity of the Internet

Update: This post, initially titled "No more nofollow-insane at Google Reader", then updated as "(No) more nofollow-insane at Google Reader", accused Google Reader of inserting nofollow crap. I apologize for my lazy and faulty bug report. Read the comments.

I fell in love with Yahoo pipes because that tool allowed me to funnel the tidbits contained in a shitload of noise into a more or less clear signal. Instead of checking hundreds of blog feeds, search query feeds and whatever else, I was able to feed my preferred reader with actual payload extracted from vast loads of paydirt digged from lots of sources.

Now that I've learned that Yahoo pipes is evil I guess I must code the filters myself. Nofollow insane is not acceptable. Nofollow madness jeopardizes the integrity of the Internet which is based on free linkage. I don't need no stinking link condoms sneakily forced by nice looking tools utilizing nifty round corners. I'll be way happier with a crappy and uncomfortable PHP hack feeded with OPML files and conditions pulled from a manually edited MySQL table.

Here is the evidence right from the Yahoo pipe output:<item><br /><title>XML sitemap auto-discovery</title><br />-<br /> <link><br />https://www.blogger.com/atom/14517520/117630008750052998<br /></link><br />-<br /> <description><br /><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/">Vanessa Fox</a> <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/04/whats-new-with-sitemapsorg.html">makes the news</a>: In addition to <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/google-sitemaps.htm">sitemap</a> submissions you can add this line to your <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=140&page=46">robots.txt</a> file:<br /><pre>Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml</pre><br />Google, Yahoo, MSN and <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/atom.xml">Ask</a> (<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://blog.ask.com/2007/04/sitemaps_autodi.html">new on board</a>) then should fetch and parse the XML sitemap automatically. Next week or so the <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/2006/02/googles-cool-robotstxt-validator.html">cool robots.txt validator</a> will get an update too.<br /><br /><b>Question: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/2007/04/is-xml-sitemap-autodiscovery-for.html">Is XML Sitemap Autodiscovery for Everyone?</a></b><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:78%;">Tags: <a rel="nofollow" style="TEXT-DECORATION:none;" target="_blank" href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine+Optimization">Search Engine Optimization</a> (<a rel="nofollow" style="TEXT-DECORATION:none;" target="_blank" href="http://technorati.com/tag/SEO">SEO</a>) <a rel="nofollow" style="TEXT-DECORATION:none;" target="_blank" href="http://technorati.com/tag/Google">Google</a> <a rel="nofollow" style="TEXT-DECORATION:none;" target="_blank" href="http://technorati.com/tag/sitemaps">Sitemaps</a> <a rel="nofollow" style="TEXT-DECORATION:none;" target="_blank" href="http://technorati.com/tag/robots.txt">robots.txt</a> <a rel="nofollow" style="TEXT-DECORATION:none;" target="_blank" href="http://technorati.com/tag/Yahoo+search">Yahoo</a> <a rel="nofollow" style="TEXT-DECORATION:none;" target="_blank" href="http://technorati.com/tag/MSN+search">MSN</a> <a rel="nofollow" style="TEXT-DECORATION:none;" target="_blank" href="http://technorati.com/tag/Ask+search">Ask</a> </span><br /></description><br />-<br /> <guid isPermaLink="false"><br />tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14517520.post-117630008750052998<br /></guid><br /><pubDate>Wed, 11 Apr 2007 07:01:27 -0700</pubDate><br /></item>
Also, abusing my links with target="_blank" is not nice.

---

Initial post and its first update:

I'm glad Google has removed the auto-nofollow on links in blog posts. When I add a feed I trust its linkage and I don't need no stinking condoms on pages nobody except me can see unless I share them. Thanks!

Update - Nick Baum, can you hear me?

It seems the nofollow-madness is not yet completely buried. Here is a post of mine and what Google Reader shows me when I add my blog's feed:

And here is the same post filtered thru a Yahoo pipe:

So please tell me: why does Google auto-nofollow a link to Vanessa Fox when she gets linked via Yahoo, and uncondomizes the link from Google's very own blogspot dot dom? Curious ...

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