Tweak the StackOverflow nofollow tag for user profiles

Question

I've been wondering why my Google Buzz wasn't linking up with Superuser and Serverfault. I got a pretty good suggestion at webapps.stackoverflow.com. In short the theory is the "rel~=nofollow" throws it off. I'm wondering if it is appropriate to require a reputation of 2000 before the nofollow tag is dropped from the profile?

Google could certainly fix this on their end, but it seems as a copied profile should just carry over the dofollow link so Google makes the XFN for Buzz. Is it possible to remove this instance of "nofollow" or to find a different way to establish non-spammer status other than reputation? I presume you're doing this to prevent spam, rather than as an incentive to get 2000 reputation points.

I plan on using the other sites in the trilogy but I doubt I'll make 2000 reputation anytime soon on them.

I think this is the message that StackExchange is trying to send:

Please come join our community. But, if your friends want to follow you, they'll have to join our community too. Thanks -- spam prevention team.

Answer 1

Addressing only your question, the reason for this is most likely spam protection. I say that the team should be safe in making the reputation requirement for followme links on the profile a little lower. I would suggest either 500 or 1000 reputation.

Answer 2

The last time I looked at this with Sam Hasler, I was assured that the rel="me" and rel="nofollow" could be combined with no issues.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

If you host user profiles and allow users to link to other profiles on the web, we encourage you to mark those links with the rel="me" microformat so that they can be made available through the Social Graph API. For example:

<a href="http://blog.example.com" rel="me">My blog</a>

However, because these links are user-generated and may sometimes point to untrusted pages, we recommend that these links be marked with nofollow. For example:

<a href="http://blog.example.com" rel="me nofollow">My blog</a>

With rel="me nofollow", Google will continue to treat the rel="nofollow" as expected for search purposes, such as not transferring PageRank. However, for the Social Graph API, we will count the rel="me" link even when included with a nofollow.

Answer 3

I believe that if some user has earned certain amount of reputation , it has by his verified engagement earned both the trust, and the right to have link to his site without nofollow. Earning 1000 or 2000 of credit to put a link to your site would be a highly inefficient way of spamming. It is correct to give a back a little bit by stackexchange to the people who put their effort and knowledge into these sites.

Make it a badge.