WebProNews

The “NoFollow” tag has its fans and its detractors; in an interview with Andy Beal, something surprising came up, and Google’s Adam Lasnik revealed himself to be among the latter (with some important qualifications).

Still, Lasnik said it, and the words are even in bold within Beal’s post on Marketing Pilgrim: “I wish NoFollow didn’t exist,” Lasnik proclaimed.

“If we can just get Matt Cutts to agree with that sentiment,” Beal added, “maybe we can get back to the business of building and growing our web sites and not having to worry so much about whether or not our normal business decisions (like linking) will anger the Google gods.”

For better or for worse, though, that’s not the end of the story.  Lasnik showed up in the comments section to explain himself and put his other quote into some sort of context.

“[I]t’d be really nice if nofollow wasn’t necessary,” Lasnik wrote.  “As it stands, it’s an admittedly imperfect yet important indicator that helps maintain the quality of the Web for users . . . .  It’d be great if we could return to a more innocent time when practically all links to other sites really WERE true votes, folks clearly vouching for a site on behalf of their users . . . .  But we don’t live in perfect, innocent times, and at Google we’re dedicated to doing what it takes to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in search quality.”

Then Matt Cutts entered the conversation.  He didn’t agree with Lasnik’s original sentiment, as Beal had hoped; instead, Cutts wrote, “Looks like Adam already stopped by to clarify. Thanks, Adam.”

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