The good news is – if you really must reference a terrible article for the purpose of condemning it, there are ways of doing so without promoting them. Yes, these ways take a few more steps than the simple click-and-share – but what matters is, it is possible.
The way I most recommend is for you to get your own blog (as I did) and every time you wish to reference an article just to denounce it, write a short blog-post on that article – and link to the offending article using the “nofollow” value for the “rel” attribute of the link – so as to let search-engines know that your linking to the article does not constitute an endorsement. Then, instead of posting the original, offending article on Facebook, you can instead post your own article that denounces it.
If you think this approach involves too much work, as you’d have to write an article of your own for each bigoted article you wish to condemn, you might want to consider this: Your article doesn’t need to be a long, full-fledged article. It can be a very brief explanation about why the post you are denouncing needs to be denounced – in short, not much more than you anyways would have written on Facebook if you dislike the article that you are sharing.
Of course – there are other alternatives if you really are dead-set against starting your own blog. For example, one alternative is Freezepage – which will freeze the page, not only allowing you to link to it without promoting it on search engines (by linking through Freezepage rather than directly) but will allow you to share a snapshot of the page – so that the offending party can’t back-pedal by changing the source site as to deny having made the most-easily-disprovable claim they made (often while continuing to make claims that are just as obviously false to those in-the-know, but not as easy to disprove). The drawback is that even if you register with the site (which you have to do if you don’t want your links to expire after a short while) you still only get 20 megabytes of free space – which really isn’t that much considering that freezing one tweet cost me more than 3 megabytes.
Another potential drawback of any such link-without-endorsing service is that you don’t know if it’s there to stay. For example, one site that I’ve heard of from multiple sources is “Donotlink”. However, whenever I tried to look at that site, all I ever got is a blank page – and from what I understand, this is because the site is defunct. As a matter of fact, shortly after I reported this to the site from which I first heard about this, they added a notice that Donotlink appears to be dead.
So really, the best way to reference a site without endorsing it is through your own blog, using the “nofollow” value for the “rel” attribute. Getting your own blog really isn’t that hard. If you have your own web-space that supports the necessary technologies, you can do so by installing the blogging software there. I recommend WordPress for this purpose – but there are other options out there too. Or, if you don’t have your own web-space (or your own web-space doesn’t support the necessary technologies) then there are plenty of sites that will gladly host your blog for you free-of-charge – for example, WordPress has a site for that purpose as well.
But whatever you do – if a site is so terrible that, when sharing it with your readers, you need to preface it with text to let them know that you’re not endorsing it – you really should do so in a way that also doesn’t let the search engines think you’re endorsing it either.
