There are many who oppose the “rel=nofollow” tag used by major search engines such as Google. But I am in favor of this tag, infact I wish we had something called “rel=negative”. So if I link a site with “rel=negative” then Google should reduce the Pagerank of the site being pointed to.

This will ensure that all the spam based sites such as the MFA (Made for Adsense) will quickly get buried (borrowing the Digg terminology!). This opens up a lot of possibilites. For example, Wikipedia could use this tag and create a spam directory!

There are couple of issues with this approach. A determined campaign against any site could potentially bring it down! Also the domain which gets a lot of “negative rank” will eventually disappear from the internet, so bringing it back will not be easy!

Note that Google already does some kind of negative ranking for those sites which link to spam Websites and for those sites which has duplicate content.

But I think there cannot be any substitute for manual filtering. What Google needs is a  dedicated team of 10 guys who will do a daily scan for top 10 spam sites which gets most traffic. Once a site is identified as spam, these guys will simply remove it from the search index.  I am not sure whether such a team exists in Google!

PS: After writing this post, I was going through my RSS feeds and came across two interesting news items. It appears that Google is actively hunting spam sites on blogger and my friend binny got tagged as spam!.  They are also going after spammers on Gmail (which seems to have backfired since they had also deleted some non spam accounts!)