Remove nofollow on links deemed reputable

Question

This is a followup to the following meta post:

Remove nofollow on links at a certain age

We have been in contact with Matt Cutts regarding removing nofollow:

... we’re trying to encourage sites with valuable user-generated content (like Stack Exchange) to have a more nuanced approach to the nofollow attribute on user-generated links. Using the attribute on all user-generated links takes away a big incentive from spammers, and prevents spammy links from being included in search ranking. However, good links can also be made invisible to search engines with this policy, so we miss out on that ranking signal, which could be used to surface better or fresher high-quality content that your users are recommending.

Starting today we will be removing nofollow on links within posts that hit a high enough threshold to be considered reputable. The details will remain somewhat vague at the moment to discourage gaming of this feature.

Answer 1

_{My comment seems to be agreeable, so I'm posting it as an answer for additional discussion.}

Nofollow should be removed from links where the post (question or answer, not comments) has passed a certain age and vote threshold.

The threshold would be reset after every edit to prevent a spammer from simply editing older questions/answers to add their link(s).

Jeff Mercado has a good point about restoring the reputable status during a rollback. This would require tracking the votes for each version of a post.

As an aside: it could prove helpful to display this vote information as part of the revision history, so that users could see how many votes each revision incurred.

---

As a different thought:

What about giving a new privilege to high-rep users? The privilege would be to vote (or flag) individual links as legitimate. Users should probably be prevented from voting or flagging their own links, and over time users could build a link score similar to their flag score.

A global list of acceptable locations could be stored so that if one user links to http://example.com/foo and it's accepted as "followable", another who also links to http://example.com/foo will automatically have their link followable. A different user linking to http://example.com/bar would not automatically have their link followable.

There will of course be issues with link-rot or sites with content that's changed after they've become followable. A followable link would need to be able to have its status revoked.

Answer 2

I like that a lot. It does no 'harm' to links in posts that do not meet the criteria (people could still click those links if they appear valuable), yet it gives a nice additional benefit for those which do.

And definitely kudos on keeping the exact details vague. No need to make gaming it too easy!