Special Interest Group on CRAP

Much has been written about the PageRank algorithm that can be used to calculate a static ranking on world wide web pages. The principle that makes it useful is that when someone links to a document on the web, they are implicitly conveying a positive impression of the page. I’ve come to the conclusion that we need a corresponding concept of CrapRank. That way when you see crap on the web, you would have a way to link to it that says it is crap.

I even have a proposal for we could do it. Some years ago a standard was put forth to allow commentary on blogs so that outbound links would have no impact on link-based ranking. The mechanism is to use <a rel=”nofollow” href=”unratedpage.html”>. The use of the “nofollow” attribute tells a search engine that the link should not be incorporprated into link analysis to convey authority. It would be a simple extension to allow a rel=”crap” attribute so that the link could explicitly label the target page as unauthoritative.

Of course in the interests of proper decorum, we should probably have a less graphic term chosen, and it is worth thinking through the kind of opinion that could be conveyed this way. The original form of a link was interpreted in PageRank to be the conveyance of endorsement. The rel=”nofollow” would be equivalent to the conveyance of “no opinion”. The rel=”crap” attribute would be equivalent to conveying an opinion that the target page is crap and should be downgraded.

In some sense we already have a much more flexible mechanism in the association of anchor text with the target page. In some sense googlebombing has been used to associate pages with terms that would not normally have been assigned to the site, through careful and strategic cooperative manipulation of anchor text for links to a page. The best known example of this was probably the query “miserable failure” which was associated with the George W. Bush biography on the whitehouse.gov website.

So maybe anchor text is the best system we can come up with. I’d still like to sometimes link to a page and say it’s crap.