This site’s linking policy
As a part of the web, this site has links to other sites, just as it has links from other sites. Search engines, Google in particular, have come up with a “HTML microformat” rel=nofollow which was made to allow blog owners to stop the passing of value to untrusted sites. On this site, the rel=nofollow microformat will be as follows:
- All uses of the nofollow will be visible to users with modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE7+, Opera, etc). All links with the nofollow will have a small yellow warning sign
and the link will be underlined with a dashed, yellow/orange line. I strongly feel that the user should be informed when a link is marked as being potentially untrusted. This is a sample nofollow link. - All links in the comments left by visitors here will initially be displayed with the rel=nofollow microformat. After 14 days, if the link has not been removed, the rel=nofollow will be removed from the link. All honest contributors to this blog should have the right to link to their site. Links that are off-topic, spam, inflammatory or otherwise unfitting will be removed. I use the DoFollow WordPress plugin by Kimmo Suominen.
- In the blog posts the rel=nofollow microformat will be used very sparingly. If a URL is not trustworthy at all, it will only be listed and not linked to.
- An exception to the above rule are links to sites that I want to explicitly mark with a rel=nofollow for personal reasons.
This policy is bound to change over time.
The original policy was based on the nofollow-policy by JLH.
