Consider a website where people can post articles, like Medium.
What is the proper way, inside the article page, to qualify a link to the author website?
What is a proper attribution to transfer some page ranking?
Currently you can either:
- use nofollow or ugc, but in this case the raking is not transferred
- not adding nofollow seems a risk, since the link is added freely by the user
I think that Google and other search engines should consider a rel="author" beside the other values already defined here:
That would definitely help to create a better web, where attributions are more balanced.
Google and other search engines can then decide to transfer some ranking or not based on the quality of the article / page.
This would also be beneficial for Q&A (e.g. Stackoverflow) that currently steal all the page rank from the original authors.
[for reference I also posted this topic on the Google Webmasters Forum]