I was on Google Finance today and noticed that they are using rel=”nofollow” on their aggregated news items. This bothers me to no end! I understand that nofollow was originally used to keep spammers from milking blogs and forums, but it also controls pagerank flow.
I noticed this when I went to Google Finance while running a Firefox extension called SEO Quake. It automatically strikes out all links that have rel=”nofollow”. I find it curious that Google would not pass rank to articles that it is highlighting. Sure, I understand why someone wouldn’t want an automatic aggregate system to pass rank because the chances of bad neighborhood content making it onto the site is not worth the risk, but is it fair?
Google puts a lot of emphasis on how important it is to get inbound links to your site. I actually blame them for much of the hype that exists around inbound links because due to the weight of inbound links, people are taking advantage of the system with link farm programs. Google is then stuck in this battle between SEOs and other search engines making it more and more difficult to get a quality link to your site.
Any respectable SEO will tell you that the best way to get links to your site is to build a content-rich and useful website. The whole purpose of the news aggregate on Google Finance is that these news sites are providing useful information to the user of Google Finance, and that’s what irks me the most about Google using nofollow on its links.
One thing about owning a website is that you have power. You can influence users by the things that you talk about. It’s like owning a coffee shop, and telling your patrons all about this really great restaurant in town. You are passing a good word on because that restaurant earned it. Linking to other websites is the right thing to do and you create a reputation as a website that is supporting the community and other websites.
Play nice and pass on links. If the content is good enough for your user then it should be good enough for Google.
One comment so far.
One thing to consider is that if search engines even crawl Google Finance or any part of Google for that matter (which would make very little sense for Google to do anyway).