On March 12, Allen Varlaki became the centre of a small tempest when he posted on his blog that Prime Minister Stephen Harper ought to be shot:

Thomas Walkom's piece on Stephane Dion and the bigger picture of federal politics got me thinking again about something I've had on the back-burner for a while. I've always maintained that there will come a point at which Stephen Harper will have to take a bullet. I mean, we'll arrive at a time when the only way we can protect this country, its ideal and its history from a violent rape at the hands of the neo-con pigs is to take this man out.

Within hours of the blog story going public, the blog was shut down.

I don't know what has happened to Allen Varlaki. But what has happened to his blog is interesting. Needless to say, the notoriety must have driven the traffic to his site up by orders of magnitude. Even now allenvarlaki.blogspot.com must be getting residual traffic from posts like mine.

So what happens to a blog that dies? What will happen to stevejanke.com when its time comes? Apparently it is resurrected as a cheap lander page for people selling ringtones:

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That title makes no sense. Neither does the site itself. Though it seems to be a site with a few links to places that offer ringtone downloads, behind the iframe is are screenfuls of <h2> tags and related paragraphs stuffed with keywords and phrases designed to push the page up the search engine rankings for all sorts of searches:

<h2>Hear Undertaker Ringtones</h2>
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<h2>Software Needed To Unlock Cingular Ringtones</h2>
Verizon Wireless Phone Graphic unlock cingular, has added another - provider s Verizon Wireless Cingular Orange retired, free V ringtone verizon lg hi fi Cingular logo and free Alltel Ringtonesno Monthly Fee, sync Problems On Chocolate Phone,

So why does this work for this spammer? Obviously the initial traffic surge helps. But that dies away. The real reason is that if a site like mine has put a link to allenvarlaki.blogspot.com, that link gives the site credibility because of my page rank (a robust 5 from Google).

So Google evaluates the page and decides that my vote for its worthiness as represented by the link means that despite its spammy appearance, it is a good page, and Google ranks it better than it would otherwise deserve. With all those different search terms stuffed into the page (visible to the Googlebot but not to us) many different searches, including many unrelated to ringtones, might be served up this page as an option. A link from a reputable blog increases the chance of that happening.

Google hates when that happens. I mean they really hate offering up lousy pages as a result of a search. As a result, over time, I might suffer. The link to a spammy page of linkbaiting garbage will ultimately lower my ranking, since Google will eventually conclude that I don't know a valuable page when I see one, and so I don't deserve the page rank I have.

One or two links is not likely to do much damage, but there is a way to handle this situation in such a way as to retain the link but not to suggest to Google that I want people to go to this page. What I do is update my links to include the "nofollow" tag:

If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

So I would add rel="nofollow" to any links I had to allenvarlaki.blogspot.com in my original article. As it turned out, I didn't have any -- just links to a Google cached image of the site. Of course, the link in this article has the nofollow tag.

Similarly, when I wrote the piece about online pharmacies, I was careful to include that tag in links to those pharmaceutical sites.

But to bloggers not familiar with these subtleties about links and page ranking, this might come as a surprise. If you did link to Allen Varlaki's site on March 12, you would do well to go back and add the nofollow tag to those links. And in general, always consider whether your link represents your vote of confidence. If it doesn't, let the search engines know.