I've recently been thinking about a lot of the sites I view through links on feministing and things I link to in my own life. If I'm using a link to "monitor the enemy" I don't want to give them hits that improve Google's results status. The teen breaks site linked to on the main page claims to appear on Google before any abortion clinic when you search for "teenage pregnancy." (I tried. And went through four pages. And didn't see it. But this is neither here nor there...)
So, what do we do about it? I went to a lecture with Deborah Lipstadt recently, the woman who was sued in England for libel by Holocaust denier David Irving. And her blog has a few suggests as to how to avoid giving credit where credit is certainly NOT due. She links to two sites:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
(which sounds like its for programs or site administrators...maybe useful for some)
and
http://tinyurl.com/#redirect
(Which I'm not quite convinced by, but am willing to give a try...)
Does anyone else have any suggestsions--proxy sites that can keep "bad" sites from improving their stats? I'm sure we'll all seen a need for this sometime in our online activism...
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I used to work at a call center where we had internet access on our computers. Well, things would get slow sometimes, and we'd amuse ourselves by sending each other funny links and YouTube videos. Only YouTube was blocked on our computers. So instead, we used http://www.slyuser.com/ to get around it. Go there, enter the address you're looking for, and it masks the URL. I mean, we were only using it to get around silly restrictions at work, but I imagine it would have the same effect you're looking for on Google page rankings, since you're technically just visiting slyuser.com the whole time.
Deliberately avoiding a direct link, or in the case of Shapely Prose, removing them from on-topic comments, has always struck me as incredibly childish and petty. If they wrote something worth your time to talk about, then obviously some credit is, in fact, due, and you should reference them.
This also saves your readers the trouble of searching for it themselves.
The answer is to use "nofollow". I'm not sure how this comment box will handle proper HTML, so I'll have to obfuscate this. Imagine the follow has angle-brackets instead of square ones:
[a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow"]
The nofollow ensures that the Googlebot ignores this link. This is quite widely used in Wordpress where all comments have nofollow embedded in the links, under the assumption that any random person can put links into comments, which the site owner doesn't necessarily endorse.