tBlog - Googles Policy about COMMENTS and whythey use redirects to protect PageRank

Googles Policy about COMMENTS and whythey use redirects to protect PageRank

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Googles Policy about COMMENTS and whythey use redirects to protect PageRank

05.12.04 (3:24 pm) [edit]

I am copying and pasting this help doc article from Google in full regarding their blogger service. It sheds a bit of light on how they feel about comment spam and artificially increased PageRank tm.

The complete unaltered text is as follows. Please share your thought and drop some comments on this blog. Thanks!

OK boys and girls, here it is:

Why do links on blogger.com (and in comments) redirect through google.com and blogger.com?

You may notice that many of the links on the site go through redirects before sending you to the link's final destination. This also happens when links are put in comments.

Sometimes, these links go to a page (on google.com) that shows the URL to which you're being redirected. Sometimes, it just goes through a blogger.com URL that is more transparent (and faster). There are three separate reasons for this:

Content posted via Blogger-in-Google. Much of the content on Blogger is not published with Blogger itself—but with an installation on the Google intranet. This install has a feature that obscures all links via a redirect in order to remove the referrer—a fairly common practice on intranet sites, so people outside don't have visibility into what you're pointing to or the names of internal sites and pages.

PageRank-flow fairness. Since blogger.com is linked from google.com, any sites we link to could pass on a fairly high PageRank value. (PageRank is one of the factors that determines what results show up in what order for searches.) In order to remove any possibility of unequal ranking of Blogger-powered blogs in the Google main search index, we send links through a URL from which Google knows to ignore PageRank. This way, Blogger blogs earn PageRank only on the basis of their content and other people linking to them, not because they're powered by a tool owned by Google.

Comment spam protection. The third place redirects show up is in comments. Any tag is altered to go through the same URL that doesn't pass on PageRank. This is to protect our users from comment spam—unwanted comments on your site that don't contribute to the discussion, but rather are placed for the comment author's benefit. A big motivation for people to comment spam is so the link they put in the comment will be crawled by Google and potentially increase their PageRank. Comment spamming for PageRank will simply not work via Blogger comments thanks to this redirect.

The original url this was published at is:

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=808" title="http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=808" target="_blank"http://help.blogger.com/bin/a...

trade linkey?