As many of you know, I'm a heavy social media user. I love finding interesting content that is typically determined by an audience of my peers who vote on articles on many different web 2.0 sites. A WebmasterWorld member, whose website is typically one of those frequently-voted-upon sites, is having trouble getting regular traffic because all of these links on social sites are nofollowed. He asks, "[I]sn't Google missing on a lot of that action by not taking this new web 2.0 dynamic into consideration?"

A few users suspect that these sites are actually the driving force behind some of the drops in PageRank from the October update.

Google might be missing out, but forum members suggest that other factors may end up causing the algorithm to shift in due time:

With all the "no follow" tags being used these days you'd think it would be nearly impossible for sites to get rankings. My guess is that google will be looking more at the volume of traffic a site gets. Especially if they use analytics.

That's certainly an incentive to use Google Analytics. ;)

Here's a thought: the users acknowledge that these social media sites can be spammed, but what about very popular pages? Should nofollow be removed when the stories reach a certain threshold of votes (assuming there are no negative votes as well--to keep out gamers)?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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