Description

The VoteLinks Microformat is one of the simplest in the pack. The problem - if indeed it is a problem - that it solves is that by linking to a web site it may be seen as some kind of endorsement or approval, when in fact the opposite may be true. VoteLinks makes use of the a element’s rev attribute to identify whether the link to the web page is one of support/endorsement, a vote against, or just indifferent, using the values "vote-for", "vote-against" and "vote-abstain", respectively. Thus, the example above might be presented as:

I would like to support <a href="http://www.barackobama.com/"
rev="vote-against">Barack Obama</a> but, really, the man needs to
make some firm commitments … 

Both examples link to the same page, but the views of the people linking are obviously quite different.

In a similar fashion, linking to a web site may also indicate to a search engine that the destination page/site is one that has some kind of value as a resource. You can use "rel-nofollow" to instruct search engines not to index the destination of the link, rather than using "vote-against".