Comments on: Nofollow Killed Google Social Graph API 3 Years Ago

By: Ingo

Ingo — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:54:59 +0000

Great reading, this introduced me to the whole XFN-Thing and the implications. Didn’t know yet that there’s such a huge impact from the nofollow… I just switched my blog to do-follow because of that.

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By: T. Martin

T. Martin — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:02:29 +0000

The most important thing is that blogs like yours encourage participation because you don’t use nofollow. Google’s nofollow element will just make them irrelevant if no one uses the tag!

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By: Miguel Salcido

Miguel Salcido — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:50:05 +0000

Great post Andy! This is probably THE most intelligent and personally relevant post regarding the Google Social Graph API that has come out thus far. The idea that the nofollow tag is the ultimate impediment to the Google Social Graph API was masterful!

Thanks again for the insights!

By: Beautiful minds

Beautiful minds — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:39:17 +0000

Andy,
Heard that the new w3c standard will have “nofollow” as a standard element.? Is it so? or is it already in practice?

(Is everyone gonna be an idiot?)

By: christophe

christophe — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:59:56 +0000

Yes, true. But also this assume that Google is following the links properly to build the network.
If you are using coComment browser extension, we can track all blogs you are commenting on or just reading and then include those blogs in your social network. This is an information that Google might have some troubles to build ;-)
What I mean by API, could also be a line of JS code that insert all the links in your blog page (or at least the most recent ones).

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:40:23 +0000

Andy it is very interesting that it is working for you, maybe there is a hole in my testing that I overlooked. I hadn't linked to my profile on Technorati recently, and due to nofollow even though my blog is quite prominent on Technorati as a top100 favorited blog, it wouldn't be indexed naturally. Since this article was written, and I linked to my profile within the article without nofollow, Google has now cached my profile page, and the results are a lot more noisy

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:32:24 +0000

Honestly I think the biggest help for Google would be for all the social sites to remove nofollow from profile links, and the same to happen with blog comments on blogs that have active moderation.

I haven’t been using cocomment for a while due to browser problems and a few complaints regarding compatibility, I do need to take another look.

APIs for this stuff is useful, but only if people create tools that make a real difference.

By: christophe

christophe — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:18:46 +0000

Hi Andy,

Great posts and interesting comments !
Just one idea I would like to submit to you.
What do you think if you have a coComment API that returns to you a list of “social” links that you can insert in your page ?
The links can contain your claimed blogs in cocomment, blogs where you are commenting or tracking conversations, blogs of your favorites, friends and neighbors in coComment….
Then, if Google do its job correctly, it should build a more complete social graph of your activity from those links.