News You Can Bruise for 2004 August 31 (entry 1)

(2) Tue Aug 31 2004 18:13 PST Negative Links: Sometimes people get ideas about how there should be a special attribute you can give to an <A> tag that indicates just how you feel about the awful, awful thing you're linking to. So that search engines and other programs that analyze links don't misconstrue your linking as endorsement. Unfortunately due to the vagueness of the idea and the fact that it's kind of hard to search for things like "html" and "link", I haven't been able to find anybody's ideas on this topic. Does anyone know of any? I don't want to make up my own ideas because that will defeat the purpose of building some ad hoc consensus.

Somewhat relatedly, some of my readers may not know (and others may know all too well) that there's a whole sub-economy based on gaming search results. The currency of this sub-economy is units of Google PageRank, and it is kind of weird.

Comments:

Posted by danny at Tue Aug 31 2004 23:32

How about this?
http://epeus.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_epeus_archive.html#90699163

(Weirdly, it's not the one I found when I first looked around, which revolved around the "rel" attribute. There's a lot of this about... Google should just announce something and get it over with.

I'm actually against votes "against" things, because that too, could be gamed. Just some sort of abstention attribute would do it.

Posted by Kevin Marks at Thu Sep 09 2004 05:41

The updated version of this is at:
http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/VoteLinks