[bbondy]

I'm the original author of the article.

I'm not sure why this made HN 2 years after posting it, but I wanted to make a comment.

SO has implemented a way to remove the nofollow links, but it is way too strict, and probably only affects a very very very small percentage of answers. I'd bet less than 0.1%.

For example see this answer with 74 upvotes from a user with almost 100k reputation. The links are to MSDN (which is probably not spam by definition) and to a quoted source on techbubbles.com. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2660355/net-4-0-has-a-new...

[kmontrose]

Those should have been un-nofollow-ed (went and looked the algorithm up), so that's probably a bug.

I'll dig into it, should have a fix in the next deploy (assuming it is a bug, but I don't see what else it'd be).

[lambda]

Hm. I took a look at a few of my highly voted comments. Some of them have nofollow, some don't. I can't really tell why. For instance, this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1990464/efficiency-of-pur... has lots of links in it, citing sources, all of which are nofollowed. A few more of my lower voted answers do not have nofollow. But this one does: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1946426/html-5-is-it-br-b.... As I go through my history, I find that most of my links are nofollowed; even ones that get more than 25 upvotes, have been around for years, and I'm within the top 1% of reputation site-wide: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5724522/creating-github-r....

So, either the algorithm is really strict and fairly capricious, or it's quite badly broken.

[lukeschlather]

You're trying to decide on your end how many upvotes/downvotes should trigger nofollow - have you talked to Google about a standard (which presumably sites like Reddit could also use) to expose that information so Google's crawlers can reach their own conclusions on a case-by-case basis if need be?