Tag Archives: nofollow

SEO Clients Deserve NoFollow Discounts

Posted on by

SEO clients may well be aware of the furor that has been going on in the SEO world. Danny Sullivan described why SEO experts were so incensed in signaling that Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting.  It is all concerned with the NoFollow tag that can be applied as part of the code for hyperlinks from web pages.

If you want to understand the implications of the changes then an article, PageRank Calculation – Null Hypothesis, will provide a lead-in to the ongoing discussion.

What does all this mean for SEO clients who have paid their consultants fees for Search Engine Optimization.  The aimClear Search Marketing Blog has a good account of what they are telling their clients in a post, NoFollow noWorries: An SEO Linking Update.

Though this 180 degree about-face in what Google had been preaching (literally) to webmasters was poorly handled from a public relations perspective, presumably it was made because the tag was overused, abused and had the potential to skew Google’s rankings. No worries. We actually think the change will bring some positive changes to the SEO process, though as always there are tradeoffs.

Of course this has all been going on in a time of recession where companies are trying to make sure they get the maximum bang for whatever bucks they still have in their budgets.  Companies paying SEO consultants who have implemented PageRank Sculpting programs are now told that such programs were ineffective.  This only came to light when Google decided to spill the beans since it looked as though SEO experts had not spotted that the Google advice was no longer effective.

It is all rather messy but the bottom line is that clients have spent money that produced zero returns.  What recourse do they have?  Who should they be talking to?

Unfortunately the biggest culprit, Google, will provide the defense that they are providing a free search service.  Too much information given away would mean that webmasters could perhaps manipulate the search results so that less relevant web pages nevertheless  would appear high in the keyword query listing of results.  If any information is given out, then webmasters should do their own checking to be sure that the information works for them.  This is somewhat facile reasoning since it is very difficult to do Split A/B testing on anything other than simple changes to web pages.

If Google is off the hook, this leaves only the SEO consultants to listen to the SEO clients.  Here again the discussion is difficult.  Reputable SEO consultants use their best skills and knowledge to provide maximum search engine visibility to their client’s web pages but without any guarantees on performance.  In this case, they were following information put out by Google and which was never withdrawn or modified until very recently. They put in the effort.  Google rendered their efforts for naught.  It would appear that the SEO consultants are off the hook too.

If companies were doing their own SEO, then they would have paid the salaries and again would have seen no results from the PageRank sculpting.  Using SEO consultants or doing SEO in-house would have had comparable effects. Perhaps this is just grin-and-bear-it time.  Search engine marketing is on average very powerful, but its mechanisms are sometimes difficult to discern. The NoFollow confusion has just added to those ongoing difficulties.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Who Killed Conversations?

Posted on by
Google’s NoFollow Dictum Has Played Its Part

Long, long ago in 2003, Miles Burke was mourning the Lost Art of Conversation and wondering how it could be encouraged. Since then things have gone from bad to worse. Online forums, the natural home for conversations, seem to have a questionable future as John Carcutt points out. There certainly is a decline in conversations as opposed to chats and instant messages.

As we will show, there are two main reasons for this happening. The first is a natural phenomenon, while the second is a result of actions by one major player. The natural phenomenon is that the Internet brings with it incredible connectivity. Everyone can connect with everyone, provided they choose to do so. If they wish, they can also broadcast to the world in real time any significant happenings in what some call their Life Stream.

The Life Stream

One of the oldest and most popular is Twitter. Your life can be recounted in a series of short (140 characters) Tweats (newslets) to any of your friends who are watching. It certainly is difficult to have a meaty discussion in such short tweats. Somewhat ironically, a Twitter competitor Jaiku, now owned by Google, is titled Your Conversation. It will shortly be open to all and describes itself as your own microblog.

Perhaps the best illustration of the nature of these life streams is provided by another newcomer, Plurk. Its display looks very much like a river.

Plurk Life Stream

As time passes, we move downstream to the left and see the comments of those we have chosen to follow. It’s almost like logs floating down a river. If you wish you can jump onto such a log and add your own comment. It can be amusing but it’s hardly a conversation.

Many are finding this plethora of social media where you can stay connected is overwhelming. Merely staying in touch can eat up a great deal of time. There’s hardly any time left to have any meaningful conversations. This is the natural phenomenon that we talked about.

Google’s First Blow To Conversations

Google is a powerful influence in the way things happen on the Internet. It has taken two major initiatives that have affected both the quantity and quality of the conversations that were occurring. The first is that its highly successful keyword search algorithm gives a major weighting to (hyper)links that point to web pages. Since this was widely known, this opened the floodgate to spammy comments on blogs seeking only to be given a link back to the author’s web page. This was so prevalent that some blog owners would block all comments to avoid this. Overall the Google algorithm has caused a significant reduction in the average quality of web conversations.

Google’s Second Blow to Conversations

The second Google initiative was a natural follow-on to their first. Noting that many website owners would pay others to create links to their websites, Google wished to block this. So they introduced the NoFollow tag. They insisted that anyone who created a page link to another web page for monetary gain should mark that link with the NoFollow tag. In this way, the search robots would disregard the link and it would count for nothing in the keyword search algorithm. The merit and efficacy of this approach for treating paid links could certainly be questioned.

What is more questionable is then using this NoFollow tag in a blanket way to devalue all comments on blogs. Spam comments on blogs are indeed a problem. Google suggested that it should be applied to all blog comments. WordPress now adopts this as the default position. However unless there is some incentive for a genuine commenter to add a useful comment, it is unlikely to happen. As noted earlier, the flood of new social media leaves little time to add a blog comment that may be read by very few. Another approach is needed here.

Fighting Back With DoFollow

David Harry has pointed out the absurdity of this approach in his Monday morning rant this week.

It is a sad statement on the times
It?s a damned funny preposition really if we think about it. At its core Google is a nodal/link based algorithm that depends largely on the links of the web to establish popularity and to a certain degree, value. Now, what if?. by some strange twist of fate, the majority of the world?s webmasters and site owners decided to Nofollow all of their outbound links in a sort of, ?better safe than sorry? manoeuvre?

If more worthwhile conversations are to be encouraged on the Web, then some different approach is needed. If comments are to be accorded links, then there must be a strong process in place to avoid giving value to worthless posts created only for links. Many are now adopting this approach and you can find some of these listed in the following:

Tougher Love For Blog Commenters

This Dofollow policy has been running for the SMM blogs for two months now and there has been a very slight increase in the spam comments. Perhaps too many are assuming that comments of little value to subsequent readers will be acceptable. You might assume that from what Digerati Marketing says about its Over 160 Relevant Link Following Blogs.

Even for white hatters, I don?t think there?s an ethical issue here. So we?re putting our comment there for the sole purpose of getting a link, yes. However, if the blog author can read this comment and they think it adds value to the post, where?s the harm in that? If bloggers are so concerned about who they are giving their link juice to, they should be using the nofollow attribute in the first place.

The SMM policy sets out to deliver best value to our readers. Unless a blog comment is helping that aim, it will be deleted. Merely leaving the blog comment there with a NoFollow tag is the worst of all possible approaches.

Related:
We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links

Posted on by
 

NoFollow is one of the most contentious tags around. That is because Google has suggested it be applied to all paid links from web pages. It does have a more acceptable usage in attempting to remove the incentive for spammers to add comments to blogs. That is why WordPress automatically applies the NoFollow tag to links in comments.

Matt Cutts has set out the Google position on the NoFollow tag, and it certainly does not imply that all comments should have the NoFollow tag applied. Recently John Mueller was one of the Google experts in an online chat and the NoFollow tag came up in the discussion. This is followed up in a Cre8asite Forum discussion on When To Remove Nofollow From Blog Comments. For both Elizabeth Able and Donna Fontenot, removing the NoFollow tag selectively seemed to be a preferred route. They recommended using the Lucia's Linky Love plugin. This can be set so that the NoFollow tags are removed after a visitor has made a certain number of comments.

In researching this, the WordPress Codex provides an explanation of Nofollow. Here is some of what is mentioned:

Despite nofollow's Google backing, there is some very strong criticism from the overall blog community.

To disable nofollow, use one of the following plugins:

An excellent and more complete discussion of the issue is given by Andy Beard in his Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins. After reading all this we settled for the tried-and-true DoFollow plug-in mentioned in the WordPress Codex.

SMM DoFollow Policy

Our policy is to encourage more valuable comments by offering their authors 'linkjuice'. This is more generous than the approach of the Lucia's Linky Love plugin. At the same time, we accept the burden of removing spam comments. The Akismet plugin already does a good job of removing most spam comments. Other comments are deleted if it is felt that they do not merit being seen by other readers of the blogs. If it is felt that a commenter has written a comment merely to gain a link, then all his comments will be carefully scrutinised and may be deleted. It's a kind of Tough Love policy but hopefully everyone wins.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Search the Internet for other related articles.
Loading