Page Rank Is To NoFollow As Google is to ______

If you visited SU Com on a certain morning in November, you might have seen something interesting. For a couple hours, my blog had a Google page rank of 4. I was excited, and hollered at a friend from Australia, who was up as late as I was up early, to come see. He came, he saw.

A little later, I was working on my blog and refreshed the page…and the page rank had disappeared. Even worse, instead of the note that the page hadn’t been ranked yet, I showed a PR of 0, which is often Google’s way of saying that the page goes against their rules.

Now, if you read my blog very much, you’ll know that I don’t have insta-ads on here. I can’t stand them, I use AdBlock Plus on Firefox to keep me from seeing them on other sites, and I’m not going to subject you, my friends, to having to see them either. I’ve thought of adding sponsors, but haven’t yet. So no paid links, nothing that Google would find offensive…except 1 thing…I have removed all NoFollow tags from my site.

Removing NoFollow wasn’t a choice I made lightly. I didn’t do it because it is a growing trend or to thumb my nose at Google, I did it because it felt like the right thing to do. Google says it’s okay for me to link back to sites that I mention in posts, sites sometimes run by people who have never visited or even heard of this blog. But then they say that it’s not okay for me to link back to you, the people who take the time to visit my blog and share your thoughts with me. To me, this sounds both rude and unfair.

Regardless of whether I’m writing about StumbleUpon or another social site, the primary focus of this blog has always been about you, my friend and reader. When I first started this blog, I knew my primary readers would be people who already knew me somehow, so I wrote the articles to my friends. Over time, as this blog has grown and I’ve gotten more comments from you, it feels even more like I’m writing to friends instead of to strangers out in the blogosphere. I try to think of the questions I have (and we hopefully share) about social sites, and I think about how I’d want to be treated.

In the grand scheme of the online world, Google is fairly important. Unfortunately though, Google has begun to remind me of King George of England back when the colonies refused to pay his taxes. “How dare they stand up to me,” he would bluster. And so he started taking privileges away, trying to force them to see what a kind king he was who wanted to do them no harm. The colonists reacted by throwing his tea into Boston Harbor. Much like the colonists, some people have started throwing away Google’s NoFollow tags.

Another friend, mberry of techne-eikon, has decided to do an experiment after hearing rumors that Google was penalizing blogs that remove NoFollow. He has removed his do-follow plug-in for a month to see if it will affect his search standings.

I will watch for his results with interest. But no matter what he discovers, this blog will remain NoFollow free, regardless of whether my page rank is at 0, 3, 4, or 10.