More Technicalese - REL

I am always improving the site and The Rundown. The vast majority of this work is behind-the-scenes - technical, coding-type stuff, layout and design, etc. - so you don't really "see" it, but the rest of the Internet (particularly search engines and the like) do. It makes it easier to find us, easier to find what you're looking for, and so forth, and it all coalesces to form a stronger site and blog(s).

Since the big Google PR debacle, I have been intrigued by the REL link attribute. For those of you who do not know, the RELationship tag can be used with links to stop spiders and robots from following the link when crawling your site (NOFOLLOW), but it's far more dynamic than that. Prior to this, I was not aware of the tag's existence, but when I looked it up, I found out there was a whole lot more to it than just the NOFOLLOW value; like I said, it is quite dynamic.

I was expecting to find a simple list of values to use with the REL tag so that I had a better understanding of what I was doing - not to mention an arsenal of values at my disposal with which to further employ the tag. Instead, I stumbled upon a cornucopia of values, attributes, arguments, suggestions, and history.

In effect, it turns out that Google is forcing us to employ an attribute and value that is not only bad form, but has a lot of worthy arguments against it.

Google has, without question, started a war on the Blogosphere.

Now, I am not going to get into the whole thing here because this is really not the appropriate forum, but since I am being forced to use the REL tag, I had to do some research into it so I knew how to best employ it in other situations, and it opened this whole can of worms for me yet again.

I just wanted to post this to let you know that, at the end of the day - when all is said and done - the short answer to the entire thing is that Google is lying about the whole matter. PageRank (PR) means absolutely nothing; given Google's model, according to their own statements, the more incoming links a site/page has, the higher it ranks in the engine listings. PR is ostensibly used to judge the "value" of these links, but in reality, I believe it is used to separate the links Netizens have "voted for" or "endorsed" from those Google is paid to place at the top of the ranks.

The real bottom-line is the same as it ever was: Google has started a war on the Blogosphere and Web, in general, to keep us from making money outside of Google's "approved" programs - of which there is only one: Google AdSense.

I said this before and let it go because I do agree with Google's pretend point: you shouldn't purchase links in order to build PageRank ("juicing"). Sponsored posts come in two forms: reviews or blatant advertisements, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that - Google's own engine listings come in the same two forms!; there is something wrong with intentionally misleading consumers and manipulating search engines, but Google created a self-fulfilling prophecy with this war.

Google has taken the bloggers', webmasters', and even users' discretion from us all; where once we could choose for ourselves which sponsors and advertisers we worked with and what we clicked on, Google has gone all Willie Hayes, ostensibly cuz we is two dum too thank four ourselfs, and made these choices "for" us. But the real reason for all of this is to coerce us into employing only their advertising.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008