[This is a follow up to: Blackhole SEO: Has Googleâ€s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?]

So the sticking point in recent days (originating from discussions last year) was why Twitter nofollows links from your profile page and your tweets.

Is it because you could be potentially linking to “bad neighborhoods”? Or social spamming links like what some marketers have been doing on MySpace, Squidoo and HubPages and potentially Google Knol?

Here is the thing: the social space and social networks in particular will need some degree of human intervention/curation. That’s why Squidoo has a staff of moderators/volunteers to review lenses, article directories have human editors. The best content review algorithmn still has a couple of years to catch up with user-generated content.

So some human intervention is needed to review content.

And if users are spending 1-2 hours each day on sites like Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, shouldn’t they gain some outbound link benefit from their efforts? Your users are building a big ball of indexable content that appears in the SEs and brings customers to your social network.

Granted, there will be organic clickthrough on resource links, especially if you post great content, but I don’t understand why the nofollows are there.

Argument #1: Prevent links to bad neighborhood which could deteriorate the originating site’s authority status. -> evolving rules-based content filters + spidering destination sites + some manual review will address this.

Argument #2: Prevent PR leakage – so why aren’t you nofollowing links to Amazon Web Services? If you’re paying AWS and not users, shouldn’t you no-follow AWS and follow users?

Argument #3: Want to build up authority status and PR by keeping PR circulating with the network, using nofollows/redirects to other sites, instead of direct links and minimizing/eliminating leakage. Which is probably the worst un-social message that you’re sending out, especially in a social network context.

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Does anyone see the irony in writing a review about a new product or service then pointing to an internal page? Am I the only one who see an overall positive review being undermined by a “but I don’t trust you enough to link direct to you”.

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So it seems like there is some old school thinking when it comes to DoFollowing and NoFollowing.

And if Web 2’s big boys become the “Man” where the priority is on maxing out the analytics/stats to boost your branding/visibility/ad rates, it’s just a matter of time before users head over to another hub where users and content are a priority.

It looks like Scott Jango might be on to starting something viral with his post: Have You Got An Affiliate Marketing Blog?

As you’re expect, the big guns of Affiliate Marketing: Ros Gardner, Shoemoney, Linda Buquet, Shawn Collins, Kris Jones, are already on the list, though I’d expect it’s just a matter of time before the likes of Ewen Chia, PlanetAndrea and Jon F appear too.

I’m lucky I didn’t do a trackback to these guys. It would’ve been pretty cheap…
Who knows, I might’ve fired a backlink at Chris Hooley, GrayWolf, Neil Patel, or even one of those crazy guys like TofuMonkey.

Who knows what might’ve happened next?

Oops.

Oh gosh.

Oh well.

I’d have shot the link into the Affiliate Marketing TickMe group (with 67 members. Yes, you need to be a member to see the group. And yes, I spawned the group). But Dave Naylor hasn’t implemented a forum/bulletin board function yet, so I can’t easily announce it to the group members.

Yes, go ahead and petition give feedback to DaveN in the comments area at: TickMe – New Social Networking Site

PS: If you feel that I’ve succeeded in creating the LinkBait Post of the Year, please let me know in the comments below.

If you don’t feel so, it only means I’ve failed.

PPS: Here’s Scott Jangro’s Affiliate Blog Directory