When the HTML "nofollow" tag is a double-edged sword

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) December 21, 2009 -- The HTML "nofollow" tag was introduced by Matt Cutts and Google a few years back to try to counteract self-promotion of websites and manipulation of PageRank (mainly through blogs).

Many websites were plagued by bloggers adding links to their own websites on message boards, passing PageRank back to their own websites in the process.

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When the HTML "nofollow" tag is a double-edged sword

Welcome visit Our WebSite:

http://www.websitedesign.my-algarve.com/

The antidote as prescribed by Google was the "nofollow" tag which basically prevents search engines from following the link to its natural endpoint, thereby blocking the transmission of PageRank at the point of the link e.g.

My Website

This mechanism works well on spammers, but unfortunately it is also used by unscrupulous website designers to plagiarize content, and plug the PageRank. I know this from experience having published articles on various websites. I have seen the same articles written by myself appearing on other websites with the links to my sites modified to include the "nofollow" tag. In fact the other sites plagiarized content often appears higher in the searches than the original which is rather frustrating.

I believe that Google and the other search engines need to be looking for more flexible solutions to this problem, rather than taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, inadvertently penalizing writers of original content in the process.

More information can be found online at http://www.websitedesign.my-algarve.com/

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