After getting back to the hotel from the Google Dance, I turned on the nofollow highlighting feature of search status extension for Firefox. After the paid links debate yesterday at Search Engine Strategies I figured I should be seeing nofollow links to see how they are being used in practice.
Today when I visited Hacker News, formerly Startup News, from Y Combinator I saw the page contains nofollow links to selective stories. I included a screen capture below of Hacker News that includes nofollow links in a pink box with a red outline. My first thought was that this is one way Paul Graham is trying to prevent spam submissions, but I wondered why some links have are trusted and others are not.
Some sites like valleywag.com are represented on the list with a regular link (#10 on the screen capture below), and then a nofollow link (#11 on the image below). If you look at link #13 it has a nofollow on it, and it is to the nytimes.com site. This was a submission by Paul Graham about the Sky feature on Google Earth, if you cannot trust yourself (pg) who can you trust?
From what I can tell, links submitted to Hacker News are nofollow until they reach a threshold of up votes (points), possibly 5. This is one interesting way of trying to keep spam submissions out. Some people long ago figured out that even if you submit a story that does not become popular to sites like digg.com you can get a back link to your site.
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