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Avatar Posted By: scottclark 165 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.w3.org)
Category: Other Online Marketing
HTML 5 A major revision of the markup language now has an official draft published by representatives from W3C Members ACCESS, AOL, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera.

Direct URL to draft
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/
3 Comments     

Comments

from dannysullivan 165 days ago #
Votes: 1 | Vote:
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Did a fast skim -- didn't seen virtually anything new or interesting in terms of search. However, nofollow now becomes an official spec. The definition:
The nofollow keyword may be used with a and area elements.

The nofollow keyword indicates that the link is not endorsed by the original author or publisher of the page.

Here's the thing. That fits with what nofollow was originally put out as, a way to say I don't vouch for a link. Of course, as part of the paid links war, Google in particular has said it should be used as a way to flag and disclose commercial content.

That's not what the W3C says -- and nofollow haters can further argue that if they have paid content that they do indeed endorse, they're going up against the spec to if they use it this way.

Scott, slightly changing your title to put the nofollow part up there.

from AndyBeard 164 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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I have never used W3C arguements, or even the changes in use, because as soon as nofollow was introduced, I used it for purposes other than what it was intended (controlling juice)

The wording doesn't really matter, because Google can say that a compensated link is a biased endorsement. If it is in the spec, pages will be valid.

My 3 main arguements:-

1. Level playing field - there shouldn't be unspecified trusted sites who can sell links, and everyone alse can potentially get a visible or non-visible penalty

2. Level playing field on compensation - employees, shareholders etc have more to gain from linking than someone trying to feed their kids.
Google have even gone as far as teaching website owners running affiliate programs how to clean up their SERPs (and concentrate juice), rather than insisting that affiliate links get blocked.

3. The vague message about other links in a post also requiring nofollow, but Google offering no technical way to selectively prevent blogging software sending a ping which could result in
problems with spam plugins.
Lots of low end paid reviews are for people reviewing other people's blog, which involves links that would automatically generate a pingback, and might also involve links to 3rd parties.

If Google wants to play government they can, but if they set laws, they should be equal for everyone, no matter what their employment status or influence.
e.g. When Matt writes about Google reader, it is just PR - he is smart enough to rip holes in it if he wanted to do an unbiased review.

Of course whatever they finally decide, they also have to display the truth in the toolbar, otherwise it is like the NY Times printing a deliberately false book review, because they don't want the author to make any money for personal reasons. Or they could just get rid of the toolbar... that would bring some life back to the Google Directory


I think Google should also clear up any public misconceptions regarding the use of nofollow on links that have some level of editorial approval, such as blog comments, or the links here on Sphinn. The only statement currently that I know of is in regards to Wikipedia, and that Google hope that trusted links will eventually have nofollow removed. There is nothing really covering other UGC.

from g1smd 164 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Most websites are still built using tag soup, so for the majority of people this is a non-event - but it shouldn't be.

Maybe if browsers started flagging error messages for non-valid code, the site creators would do a better job.  I see stuff all the time that fails to render or seriously stretches the error correcting routines within browser rendering-engines.


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