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This week, the Wikipedia community announced that all outbound links on its site would be appended with the rel=”nofollow” attribute. This decision has stoked an already-heated debate on the web about equality, accountability and the flow of trust.

When inserted into hyperlinks, the snippet of HTML code forces Google to ignore the linked page when judging how important it is. Google and engines like it rank pages within search results based on how trusted those pages are on the web — the more inbound links leading to a page, the higher the perceived trust, and the higher that page’s rank in a web search. Appending the “nofollow” attribute to a link essentially makes the linked page invisible (in that particular instance) to Google’s PageRank census-takers.

Wikipedia’s decision arises from the abuse of the site’s well-trusted status to falsely provide credibility, or “link juice,” to outside pages. Anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, so anyone can add a link to any page, relevant or not, and gain PageRank points.

Google first took steps to fight PageRank gaming within comment spam in January, 2005. Ever since then, the debate over the efficacy of a strict nofollow policy has been raging on Wikipedia. The community has even enforced it in the past before dropping it for a while.

Wikipedia site editors are faced with several dilemmas. They can eradicate non-relevant links by cleaning up recently edited pages, which requires a human to assess each outbound link. They could also institute a waiting period policy on outbound links, keeping them inactive for a specific timeframe or until they’ve been vetted. Both require human interaction and both are time consuming. Another issue is that a strict nofollow policy would deny link juice to credible, deserving websites.

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There are hundreds of millions of Web surfers today. Each of them uses one of multiple web browsers available now. You as a Webmaster create cool web pages that are full of graphic and JavaScript and look very impressive in modern web browsers like Internet Explorer or FireFox. But ask yourself: “How my cool web page will look like, if the web surfer use Linx browser (text based) or just disabled JavaScript support?” You may think that number of Linx browser users is quite small today and you can ignore them, but search engines spiders does not support JavaScript as well. You cannot ignore search engines in the modern world.

There are some safe ways how to handle search engines spiders and web surfers, who does not support JavaScript, at your web page.

One of the approaches is provided by HTML. It is a NOSCRIPT tag. You can enclose in NOSCRIPT tags HTML code that will be displayed in browsers that do not support scripting. You can place navigation hyperlinks here, if you use JavaScript menu for this purpose. Instead of content, dynamically generated by JavaScript, you can place some static text between NOSCRIPT tags. NOSCRIPT content is invisible for web surfers, who use modern web browsers, but it will be very useful for Linx users and search engines spiders.

The second, more flexible approach, is using of JavaScript. Yes, you can use JavaScript to handle visitors, who does not support JavaScript. It is simple. You can place at the web page HTML elements with the content that should be visible for these who does not support scripting. Then place at the bottom of the page simple script code that sets “.style.display” property to “none” for such elements. Therefore, if your web page is viewed in the browser, which supports scripting, script code will be executed and all additional elements become invisible. If your web page is viewed in the browser, which does not support scripting, script code will be ignored.

So, using these simple approaches, you can handle all possible web browsers and provide search engines spiders with additional relevant content, which is very important as well.