The misuse of the rel=”nofollow” attribute can harm the structure of the CC web, and may be even against attribution and non commercial terms. I’ll explain why.
The nofollow, introduced by Google, tells search engine robots to not give weight (relevance) to a link. That, for example, is an effective way to discourage spammers that drop links in blog comments to give an artificial weight to their scammy webs.
But, when a CC author requires that the attribution of a work includes a link back to the source —perhaps, because he wants to ensure that future users can check any clarification or notice about the situation of the work—, adding a traffic and/or semantic restriction to the link means that access to the attribution resource has been arbitrarily blocked by the receiver of the license for certain modes of access, using a method which original purpose was to restrict potentially malicious links. What you must keep in mind is that, actually, the Creative Commons license already contemplates that the link should point only to the page where the author’s attribution and licensing information can be found. That’s it, it must not be malicious. You cannot modify a Public Domain work, license it with CC-BY, and ask for a link back to an unrelated resource.
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