It’s Google’s Way or The Highway
I have made a major mistake. And I don’t want you to do the same thing. There is a very thin line between making money online and search engine optimization. Unfortunately, with this large crowd of bloggers who are all about making money online these same bloggers are also typically all about search engine optimization. And for what the reasons may be, I don’t know… but the two seem to go hand in hand. More likely its largely because, in order to make money online your site has to be search engine friendly and optimized so that you can score tons of traffic from the search engines in order to make money online.
In the last two days, I have been doing a lot of reading. I want my blog to continue to grow in popularity. I want my blog to continue to rank well. And from discovering what I have learned over the last two days, I am very surprised to see my site ranking at all in the search engines. Honestly, I think the only thing I have going for me is the massive amount of content I produce and publish.
I want my other blogs to continue to make money online for me as well as continue to rank in the search engines. I have been doing well. But, I want more. The amount of money I make now, just isn’t good enough. I don’t want to be rich… but I do want to live better. Again, after discovering what I have learned in the last two days, I am surprised that I am making even a dime.
There is a mile long list of things I have been doing wrong! This article is very important for you to read. And I only hope that: a.) it will help correct the things I have been preaching in the past and, b.) it will teach you how to really open up the flood gates with maintaining a healthy and successful blog. Prepare yourself, because this is going to be a long article! (*sorry!)
It all really sums up to this statement:
It’s Google’s way or the highway….
You can agree or disagree with the things they say. But all in all… if you don’t comply with their Webmaster Guidelines and TOS, you will pay the price. In this article I am going to try my best to keep things short and sweet. I know that the attention span of bloggers (including myself) is limited. People like articles to be short and sweet and to the point… It’s going to be very difficult to do that in this article but I am going to try my best.
Text-Link-Ads, ReviewMe.com, PayPerPost.com… they are BAD!
According to Google Webmaster Guidelines, you are not supposed to participate in programs that attempt to sell links towards gaining or increasing Google PageRank. This is even listed as their “Basic Principals”. Meaning… hello!!! this is a no-brainer!
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
- Google Webmaster Guidelines.
If you choose to participate in these programs, you will pay the price! It doesn’t matter what your opinion is. It doesn’t matter if you feel it is right or wrong… the bottom line is simple: If you choose to participate in these programs, you will get penalized if not banned from Google. Plain and simple. I am not here to tell you if this is “Right” or “Wrong”, I am just here to tell you how it is. Google do not look highly upon people who use these programs. I speculate that the famous John Chow has been suffering from this issue for weeks. Earlier this month his site took a huge hit in the SERPS. Granted it bounced back up but his ranking have been adjusted again. John Chow blames the second occurrence of this loss in the SERPs because his site wasn’t accessible to the Googlebots when they attempted to crawl it. He blames his site being down because of a WP Plugin he attempted to install causing a MySQL overload, thus crashing his site. His fist occurrence was blamed on a Google Algorithm update. I believe that John Chow has been fighting a long up hill battle to stay alive in the SERPs and has been sweating like a stuffed pig to keep his site from getting completely banned. [See Footnotes #1]
DOFOLLOW, IFOLLOW, NOFOLLOW, BLOGROLL
The rel=nofollow. Man, I am ignorant… or was at least. But there is a difference between being ignorant and stupid. And stupid, I am far from. Ignorant… at times, yes… and about many things. But again, I am far from being stupid. I have been given a brain to learn with, thus I can break free from the levels of ignorance on the rare occasions I actually get my head out of my ass. Which… isn’t too often! 
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.
- Official Google Blog 1/18/2005
The rel=nofollow tag is here for a reason. It is important to understand what it does, what it represents and how it can effect you if you choose NOT to use it. There is a HUGE movement of bloggers who are protesting the rel=nofollow tag. These people are called the DOFOLLOW or IFOLLOW groups. I am sorry to tell you guys this, but these people are doomed. It’s the equivalent of an ant colony standing up against a gallon of gasoline and a lit match. The DOFOLLOW groups will never over power Google. Google will pour enough fuel on their colony to power a Boeing Jet across the country. If you are a DOFOLLOW blogger, I would strongly suggest to stop because you may get burned.
…remove the evil nofollow attribute from your comments.
- SemioLogic.com
The rel=nofollow tag has been in place for at least two years, maybe longer. And it is not evil. It was designed to protect you! I did some digging on the rel=nofollow tag. I wanted to trace it back to its origin and figure out what it is, why it was created and why it is used. What is ignorant about the DOFOLLOW crowds is the fact that with just a little time and effort, the rel=nofollow tag can be investigated. Just as I have done. The conception of the rel=nofollow tag was developed to help protect bloggers from comment spam. The rel=nofollow tag was created to protect you, not harm you… So, we have the DOFOLLOW crowd that feels the NOFOLLOW tag is harmful when in reality of things, it’s the complete opposite. The rel=nofollow tag was developed to protect the individual blogger who suffers from the everyday practice of spammers, specifically the ones who take advantage of the comment systems found on most blogs.
Rel=nofollow was created to shield you and protect your blog and your content from being robbed of its juice. People are so concerned with who they link to, or making sure their links are reciprocated, etc. With the rel=nofollow, you don’t have to worry about all that. The popular and funny parody to rel=nofollow is to that of having protected sex using a condom. Wearing a condom, you can screw pretty much anything that walks (two or four legs) and is warm blooded and significantly lower your risks of catching a sexually transmitted disease. With the rel=nofollow, the same principle is involved.
Effective as of June 27th, 2007. My site is officially a NOFOLLOW blog. If I lose readers because of this, then they weren’t truly my friends in the first place. I am here to help you become successful blogging and being a DOFOLLOW blog is not the route to take. Sorry.
- I will no longer participate in linking contests for the purpose of increasing PageRank.
- I will no longer engage into activities that promote or associate with linking contests for the purpose on increasing PageRank.
These activities include, Technorati Faves Exchanges and programs on a similar caliper. These linking contests as they may seem to be for increasing awareness of your blog, they can also be perceived by Google as a means of trying to increase your PageRank. Secondly, participating in these programs causes harm to your PageRank. The more external links you have on each page require a huge amount of internal links to balance them out.
The blogroll is one of the most common ways to drain your site of it’s PageRank. The blogroll I have, without using the rel=nofollow tag will drain my link juice quicker than an H2 Hummer can drink gasoline. My choices are to a.)Remove my blogroll or, b.) assign the rel=nofollow tag to the links in my blogroll. And I have chosen to keep my blogroll because I want to share with my readers all the other blogs that I read and visit. The purpose of my blogroll has been adjusted. I will admit that my blogroll was being used as a tool to try to leverage PageRank. The old saying, “Ignorance is bliss” is not really valid in the world of Google. They don’t care if you are ignorant, stupid or simply rebellious… if you don’t comply with their rules and if you don’t understand how their search engine works, then you will pay the price. [See Footnotes #2]
Duplicate Content That is of Your Own and Other’s
Duplicate content is a no… no… and it is in many ways almost equally as bad to duplicate your own content as it is from duplicating other’s content. It is obvious that stealing other people’s content is wrong… so I am not going to go into a lot of detail there. Only thing I will say about this is: Don’t Do It!
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
- Google Webmaster Tools
Now, aside from that, there is a major issue with bloggers duplicating their own content. The problems are as follows:
- Bloggers aren’t aware they are doing it.
- Bloggers are aware but don’t see it as a problem.
- Bloggers are aware and see it as a problem but don’t know how to correct it.
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.
- Google Webmasters Help Center
Bloggers duplicate their own content by allowing it to be published in multiple areas within their blog. Most blogs (commonly Wordpress) have many sections where you can find the same post. The post itself is located on its own page (the post page), however, that same post commonly can be found in the category page, archives, page, home page, tag page, yearly archives, monthly archives, weekly archives, daily archives, etc… by the time it is all said and done… that ONE post is published in 10 or more places.
On June 10th, 2007 when I did my website make over, I came into the design being aware of this. I will include a reference in my footnotes about it. It is important that you don’t duplicate your own content. Once again, Google Webmaster Guidelines has specific documentation regarding this. In addition to their reference, one thing that Google doesn’t speak of but makes perfect sense is their Googlebot. Again, this piece I have known for awhile, my site’s redesign reflects this as does my other site that I just redesigned yesterday. See footnotes on that too.
Google says, let the Googlebot freely crawl your site and they will take care of properly indexing it for you. But the truth of the matter is this: The Googlebot is like a typical domesticated dog. The Googlebot is smart because it can do things, (like sit, rollover and play dead)… but it is stupid, just like a dog, because you can’t teach it certain levels of logical thinking. Meaning, you can teach a dog to fetch a stick, just as you can tell the Googlebot to fetch a site, but you can’t tell a dog to make a decision on fetching a certain stick if all the sticks look the same… and the same goes for the Googlebots… “You can’t expect the Googlebots to fetch your content in the right place” and 9 out of 10 times your content is indexed in Google incorrectly. Ideally, you want your post page indexed in Google. But commonly what happens is the archive sections, category sections and tag sections get indexed instead and your actual POST PAGE gets put into the Supplemental Index. All in all, it is up to you to teach the Googlebots (and all the other bots out there) where your content is located and how you want your content indexed. The use of Robots.txt files are great towards combating the ADHD Syndrome of Googlebots. Also the use of Sitemap.xml is needed as well. [See Footnotes #3]
Summary:
I follow and respect rules. Especially the rules that paint a picture and draw a map clear as day on how to rank well in Google. I may or may not lose readers from publishing this article. I may or may not make some people mad. I can’t say that I don’t care… because I do. This article is a document that illustrates what I am about and what I believe in. This is my road map (or part of one to say the least) to success with ranking well in Google. You can either follow it, or don’t. As far as me… you can love me or hate me and as far as my site, you can either like it or leave it. I am not the type of person who covers up mistakes… I learn from them.
This is a NOFOLLOW blog. This blog complies with Google’s TOS and Webmaster Guidelines. I will no longer participate in ReviewMe.com, Text-Link-Ads, and the others. I will not participate in any programs designed for tweaking, leveraging, manipulating, or changing PageRank. I do not duplicate content, steal content from others…. my content and everything I publish is creative and most importantly, unique. Part of the purpose of this article is to illustrate where I stand in the blogosphere and to try to help the thousands of other bloggers who want what I want. My intentions are NOT to burn any bridges or hurt any feelings. My intentions are to HELP everyone by publishing information that will hopefully be taken into consideration so that we all can continue to push forward in our ventures of gaining success and popularity in the Google search engine.
Footnotes:
- Text-Link-Ads. A Scam? | Text Links and PageRank, Matt Cutts | Google Webmaster Guidelines | Google SERP for Make Money Online | Live By The Google, Die By The Google, John Chow | Google Updating Algorithm, John Chow
- Preventing Comment Spam, Official Google Blog | Stop The Spread of Viral Skank, Link Condom | How a Blogroll can Kill Your PageRank, Andy Beard | How To Add the rel=nofollow To Your Wordpress Blogroll, Avinash
- Google Webmaster Guidelines | Duplicate Content, Google Webmaster Help Center | Adding A Sitemap To Your Blog, Garry Conn | Make Wordpress Search Engine Friendly, Wolf-Howl SEO Blog | Search Engines Unite on Sitemaps Article Discovery, Search Engine Land *Thanks to CyberCoder For The Reference | The Google Sitemap Generator For Wordpress | Blog The Internet, redesigned for SEO
- Joel Comm's Free Adsense DVD - Get your very own copy of Joel Comm's FREE DVD. It is packed full of Ready-to-Copy profit secrets of the World's Most Recognized Adsense Experts! (Hurry supplies are limited!)
- Search Engine Optimisation - Leading Australian search engine marketing company offering search engine optimisation and paid search management services
- Shopping Cart Software - World class shopping cart softwarewhich makes it easy to sell anything online.
Garry I appreciate the amount of time you have spent in research, but there are definitely some holes.
With paid reviews I believe all the major search engines have stated or in Google’s case, they just agreed with the others in general without being specific, that they would look at the overall nature of a site. If most of the site is original uncompensated content, you are not going to get banned.
They are after spammers, not people who write reviews for a small amount of compensation that are highly relevant to their audience.
I think the worst case scenario is that Google will discount links from a specific post, or for the worst offenders limit their ability to pass on link juice.
With Dofollow it is a personal choice - I use Spam Karma and have provided instructions on how to set it up. It is great even for blogs I want to spend very little time on attending to comment moderation.
A few “bad links” can always slip into any website, hell my site could have been looked on as a “bad neighbourhood” to link to, a domain holding page, for a couple of days this last weekend, through no major fault of my own.
Links from your content are just as likely in 6 months time to be links to a bad neighbourhood as links from your comments.
As to blocking out various pages from being indexed, having spent 5 minutes looking around your site, the reason a lot of your content might hit the supplemental index is lack of google juice.
The more you try to optimize your site, the more careful you have to be to not make things worse for yourself.
Other than your most recent content, everything else could quite probably tank, and that is fairly normal on most blogs.
Wow! Well hello Mr. Andy Beard (lol)
When I saw you appear on my MBL sidebar, I was thinking to myself, “hmm… I wonder what he is going to say?”
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I appreciate that. I really enjoy reading your blog and intend to make it one of my very regular reads. Now for addressing your comment:
I am not taking a chance. There are a million and one different ways to make money online. I don’t need Text-Link-Ads, ReviewMe.com, or PayPerPost.com to do it. If I was to sell my car, I wouldn’t hire someone and pay them 50% of my profit to do it.
Second point to this is the, “that they would look at the overall nature of a site“, that makes me nervous.
All in all… the highway robbery commission fees and the added microscope I put my site under in Google eyes, to me… makes participating in these programs Not Worth It.
Next point,
Have you seen any of the reviews being done lately via ReviewMe.com? It’s a joke. I only wish I could help educate these advertisers and give them the heads up. This is one of the worst ways to spend your advertising dollars. Granted, sites like John Chow’s and others… yeah. It’s worth the money. But lower level blogs (such as mine… I have no shame! lol) advertisers are just taking buckets of money and throwing it in the river. It’s terrible and I really feel bad for the advertisers.
I would like to point you to Thor Schrock’s ReviewMe.com Experience. And while you are there, pick up this read as well titled, Give or Sell Links On Your Blog, which touches on Matt Cutt’s announcement on How To Report Links To Google. So for me, none of this is worth the risk. I can make more money online with the traffic Google gives to me freely by creating my own business model and independent advertising without selling a promise of boosting my advertisers PageRank.
Next Point,
I don’t want that happening to me…
Next Point,
I am very interested in picking your brain on that… Can you point me to some discussions that have already touched on that, or explain further how this is? I really would love to learn more about that.
Next Point,
You are right about that! On June 10th, I rolled out my new design and have quite a few new things in place. The only thing left for me to test is the meta description tag usage. I am debating about removing that completely from the pages. I have figured out a pretty crafty way to produce unique description tags on each page, which is hard to do with Wordpress… but even still, I am thinking about leaving the assigning of page descriptions to Google. The lack of juice is the result of mistakes made in the past… I have a good feeling that will change moving forward. My site now pulls up on the first/second page for “Blogging Tips” which was my initial goal. I started in baby steps by landing “Successful Blogging Tips” and worked up to “Blogging Tips”. The site also pulls up with famous, “Make Money Online” around the 4th to 5th page… but I wasn’t expecting that. In fact, I am now wanting to change my title because of it…
Can you explain more about that?
Andy, it was great to have you come here and drop a comment. I would love to have you come back for a second round to answer some of these questions. I know it would be a great learning experience for me as well as the readers. Thanks again for dropping by.
Thank you for the article, I actually knew most of this but like Andy I think they were meaning those that spammed or made blogs specifically to do that. I actually joined those programs not to spam or upo my rank though, I joined them to feed my family. I also noticed that that was created on or around 2005 which was before the paid blogging boom. Right?
On blogrolls- does this mean you’ll be taking down your blogcatalog and mybloglog? I really love these two programs, helps me visit others. Without these in people’s sidebars I don’t think I’d find half the people I do.
hehe, I had wondered where you had gone, now I know. That is a really long article with LOTS of great information. Thanks again.
Honestly I’ve been waiting for them to get upset with me over my contest entries, but they are so much fun to research and show others.
As for the linking contests, if this is the case…why hasn’t John Chow been booted yet? Doesn’t he do that “Evil” plan where he gives away something for writing a review (seo related) of his site?
I don’t think it is entirely fair of them to ban if we do the follow/no follow as I’ve been told blogger (blogspot) blogs actually do follow.
BTW- love the footnotes.
No… No… I am more focused on my site itself. I am focusing on better control of my internal links as well as external links on my site directly.
This sidebar widgets such as BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are not machine readable… meaning search enigne bots such as the Googlebot can’t see them. They are Javascript codes and can’t been read. These widgets are fine to have on your site.
I actually speculate that he is having some trouble with Google, as mentioned in the article and provided below:
and…
Eliza, at this point in time… I am calling myself, a nervous blogger. I want to do right in Google’s eyes but on the same token I want to continue success online. It is great to have Andy commenting here on this article. The longer I blog and the longer I continue to educate myself, the more I see there is to this. Andy’s site is great and I would totally recommend every blogger who shares a common interest on this exact topic to visit his blog, subscribe to his feed and most importantly… read! If time is a factor… pull the article and read offline… print them and read them during your lunch break… for a blogger to find success, reading is essential.
As far as this blog being a DOFOLLOW or NOFOLLOW … I guess, that was premature… and I am actually somewhere in the middle. I want relevant links I provide in my comments to be indexed and accounted for. But I don’t want the average drive by blogger to drop a comment on an article, leaving his link and to never be seen again and have his link rob me of some link fuel. I want contributors to have the fuel, such as yourself… Top contributors of this site obviously have a common ground with what I write… otherwise there would be zero interest. These type of links, I think are acceptable.
My current blogroll… that is not acceptable. Without the rel=nofollow applied to these links, I would be draining my fuel quicker than thirsty person on a desert could drain a canteen. Thus, killing my PageRank as the thirsty person would end up killing himself on the desert by not rationing his water supply.
You should possibly read my most recent paid review as it will explain a lot about linking structures.
The poor quality reviews that people buy is their own fault. PayPerPost Direct only charge 10% on top, and eat the fees for processing, so it is hardly taking all the money.
Some of the PayPerPost reviews through their main marketplace might seem a little short, but they are true to the voice of the bloggers, many of whom have far more traffic than I do. Some of the “mommy bloggers” have far more traffic than people regarded as A listers.
My first paid review with PayPerPost direct was syndicated as a featured article on searchnewz.com
You linked through to 3 very relevant articles in your comment, but Google will never know they are relevant, and the guy you linked to will never know you even linked to him unless he monitors his referral stats for my click through.
I know all about how to report paid links - I have enough confidence in the quality of my reviews to have reported them myself to Google as an example of the quality content they shouldn’t be disounting the editorial links from.
The choice is yours to make, but you are effectively the victim of Google FUD
Ha Ha! And you know what… I agree with you 110% there. I do totally. I depend so much on Google and without Google I wouldn’t be where I am at today. So, yes… I am nervous, very… and nervous for my readers. I want for my readers what I want. And this is to have a ray of sunshine beam down on our sites from the solar radiant entity called Google.
When you left that comment, I said to myself… “What the hell is FUD?” so to everyone that wants to learn, provided below are some references:
So, yes… without a doubt, I am a victim of FUD.
and…
You are right… and for that reason, I have my DOFOLLOW plugin installed again. And will read your article on Spam Karma. I feel that it is important to remove rel=nofollow from links such as the ones made in my above comment as well as in this one. And without using any tools to do so, not only does this shut the door on Google in indexing relevant content and make it difficult for the original author to know you linked to him… but another thing it does is makes my job difficult when I am searching and trying to research information. At times, most of the real juicy bits of content are found in comments and comment links… and when Google can’t index these links accordingly… the end user, such as myself, will have a very difficult time finding the information needed. A few of these references in my foot notes were found because of the source RSS feed being indexed and NOT the actual comment.
With the blogroll are these link relationships recognized by Google. Are these alternatives to rel=nofollow?
Andy, you are providing me with some excellent teasers and you are encouraging me to learn more and I am sure this is affecting the readers here as well. All in all… we all want to make money. I want to do it while not jeopardizing my standings with Google. Is that possible? I am learning that your site is one of the few places to go to find that out. Your blog is gold and I am investing more time reading it.
There are so many Microformats that can be used for different purposes. One of the most interesting is for reviews.
Gosh, so much I want to say about this, but I have to run for work! I’ll return later today, but briefly I just wanted to comment about the Text-Link Ads, etc.
It sounds more to me like Google is talking about other things unrelated to what these three do. Aren’t they talking about link farms and such? I supposed they could also be referring to the link boosters we see from time to time (Alexa, Technorati trains come to mind). But I can’t imagine that services like TLA can be seen as a scheme. It’s probably more to do with Google wanting to have a monopoly — few distractions from their ads mean more attention and clicks — and money.
That’s all I have to say for now, but will definitely return to soak up some more.
yes, I think you are right. TLA is a competing business and it could be perceived that Google wants to do away with competition. I am quickly learning this widely accepted perception. The only problem I have is choosing to rebel against the system that feeds me traffic.
TLA does make me money. But, the amount of money made each month to me, isn’t worth the risk of losing my positions, rankings with Google. And unless someone is going to give me a new search engine that accounts for such a huge percentage of my traffic, I really have no choice but comply with their rules… or as Andy says, Google FUD.
The truth of the matter is… there is a lot more research I need to do and I intend to do it.
Google is out to get rid of all pais link ads. They are considering the use of a new tag that publishers could use to label paid links so they are not counted toward SEO rank. Publishers who do not use the new standard could see their own rankings fall.
http://www.thorschrock.com/2007/05/09/give-or-sell-links-on-your-blog-google-will-stop-you-soon/
Wow, well thought out post Garry. This has already and I bet it will continue to incite great discussions for awhile to come (which is a good thing).
Its great to see Andy Beard participating, and I tend to agree more with him. I read Matt Cutts blog regularly (on the Google Search team), and he’s commented on this stuff before, or at least as much as he’s allowed to without giving things away.
To me, a lot of this stuff are rules that aren’t enforced intentionally. That way they can lean back on them with spam sites and such that are breaking the rules.
I do think the link trains, exchanges, etc. are generally a good way to meet people, but generally not a good way to improve your site. All those incoming links are from PR1, PR2, and PR3 sites, which could cause your site to look like a splog to the search engine, or like you’re getting the benefit of other splogs. One link from say ProBlogger or an A-List site goes a LOT further than say 20 incoming links from small sites. That is why I don’t put much stock in Technorati’s ranking system, because their algorithm is extremely flawed. Google has also stated (I believe) that they only weigh incoming links from sites with similar keywords, so incoming links from a computer gaming site or an aviation site won’t do a site like yours any good. Only incoming links from technology, blogging, and make money online sites will be beneficial in this sites case.
You seem very motivated and you’ve done a lot of good research. I would recommend making some of these changes and share your observations with us over the coming weeks. Kind of like a case study. I think that would be extremely beneficial to you and your readers.
I have to respectfully disagree with some of your statements.
I do think that you have to be careful with participating in linking schemes. However, if you aren’t publicizing them as a linking scheme, then it’s probably not a big deal. For instance, Darren Rowse’s group writing projects could be considered a linking scheme. Is Google going to penalize Darren and the participants? No, because the major intent of his group writing projects is to promote each other’s blogs. Darren doesn’t talk about “boosting” your page rank or your Search Engine rankings. You have to be careful with the “intent” of the memes, group writing projects, etc. that you create.
As far as TLA, for years I considered selling through TLA. I was scared to because of Google’s position on the topic. However, there are lots of major TLA sites that rank high in the SERPs. So, I decided that it would be ok to sell them. I may take them off my site for other reasons that I don’t want to get into here. On the other hand, TLA does represent competition to Google. So it does make sense for Google to scare people away from using TLA. If Google came to me and said, “George stop using TLA or we lower your Page Rank juice or whatever (like they did with Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny) then I would discontinue them right away.
I personally find no-follow’s to be a horrible creation and never intend to add them back to my blog.
Duplicate content is not nearly as big of a problem as it is made out to be.
One general comment:
The Search Engines need to stop worrying about telling us webmasters what to do and need to take their technology to the next level. Otherwise, they are likely to be left in the dust by the next big advance in technology, much like the Search Giants of old (Altavista, etc).
Hopefully, Google won’t penalize for me this comment
Garry, you know I contacted you in private about this, but on your request I am happy to share some of what I said in the comments.
I think turning on no-follow on your blogroll would be a mistake, because you might tick off the people who traded links with you. I suggest looking at your current rankings and if they aren’t dropping then just keep the links. Maybe you could stop trading blog roll links, that way you don’t have to add any more links to your blogroll. Also, keep an eye on other people dropping you from their blogroll. When they do, then go ahead and drop them. It happens a lot more often than one would expect.
All the best and keep up the good work on your blog.
- George
Hi George,
Nofollow was created to combat comment spam. People dropping their links that had no relevance to the subject matter (just look at the guestbook of an average mom-and-pop site that’s older than 1 year). The idea was/is that you do not vouch for the links people put in your comments, either through their name or in the comment itself. With spam-karma and akismet you can do a great job of this yourself as well, but what happens down the line?
By not using rel=”nofollow” you’re vouching for the people that comment on your site. That’s cool if the link actually goes to a site/bog of interest. Now, say that you check it out and you see the link going to an interesting blog, but will you still check that same link three months from now or after a yea?. With a simple 301 that blog may have disappeared and you’re now pointing to a child pornography site. And you’re vouching for that site….. That’s something I don’t want to see happening.
I think you should use nofollow only where you are not in control. You control your blogroll, you probably check the blogs on your roll once in a while so you know what’s happening there. If you’re serious about what you’re writing you’re linking to websites that have high standards and are not very likely to ‘go porn’ on you. But you’re not in control of the people that comment and you probably also don’t check their sites as often as you do the ones on your blogroll. That’s exactly the reason why I think comment links should be nofollow-ed; you can’t vouch for them so you shouldn’t.
Besides, I’d rather have no comments than people commenting just for the backlinks.
Something else: Google (as well as the others) tend to see pages with more than 100 links as linkfarms. I think that when they say 100 links, they mean 100 followed links (at least Google does). If you have a lot of links because you have a lot of comments, and they’re all followed, chances are that your pages will be seen as linkfarms. Also something that’s not good for your site.
NB: please remember I’m not trying to give you grief. I like your site, have visited it occasionally and liked the content every time.
No offense taken. I understand the reasons for and against the no-follow tag. However, it’s original reason for being created was so that the Search Engines could determine which links were valuable and which weren’t. The problem is that the no-follow tag is abused by webmasters to keep “link juice” on their sites. Some webmasters use it on their links pages, so that their reciprocal links pages aren’t really reciprocal, etc. It is an easily abused tag.
My position is that this is the Search Engine’s problem to solve and not a problem that webmasters should have to solve for the Search Engines. They don’t pay us to work for them, they should be the ones who solve this problem. I think the no-follow tag has actually added to the problem. Some sites use no-follow tags on ALL their outgoing links. Certainly some of those links should be counted by the Search Engines. I just don’t like the no-follow tag, never have.
Aren’t we saying the same thing, but just putting the responsibility differently? You’re saying it’s the search engine’s job to distinguish between relevant/valuable and irrelevant/worthless. I’m saying that the responsibility lies(lays?) with the webmaster.
Personally, I like the idea that you have the possibility to do this yourself. You can decide who you vouch for and who not. That makes nofollow something I want to use.
What you’re saying about webmasters using nofollow on reciprocal links that’s definitely uncool, but that’s something you can complain about and remove your link to them if they don’t want to change this. NB: before nofollow (and now) you could also do this by generating links with JavaScript so search engines can’t read them (see: http://www.wolf-howl.com, the advertisements). I see this as another discussion.
Something else I’m just thinking about: when I read Garry’s original article I thought he was saying that having outbound followed links makes him lose PR. You’re now saying something similar (about link juice). I’m hoping you mean that having a lot of links on your page makes the links to your own pages within that page less valuable, right? You’re not saying that you lose PR of the page you’re linking out from, right? Just checking.
>You’re not saying that you lose PR of the page you’re linking out from, right?
yes.
Could you clarify this? I just can’t imagine the reasoning behind this.
I am going to jump in here and give you a quick technical demonstration.
Here is a very simple website. A homepage that links to 4 individual pages, and each of those 4 pages only link back to the home page.
Look at the value of relative pagerank, it is based on 40 recursive calculations.
Now we are going to add an external link to each of the individual pages.
The relative Pagerank of every page on the site decreases.
Even if you add 2 incoming links to every page, the relative pagerank doesn’t recover.
If you want to get really geeky about things, you might find this useful and it includes what I have determined might be the best linking structure to use for a dofollow blogger.
http://andybeard.eu/2007/06/wordpress-seo-masterclass-for-competitive-niches.html
It is still quite a simplified model which I still have to adopt, some of my current ball linking single pages have 100s of tags channeling Google Juice away to other parts of my site, but due to the way Pagerank is calculated recursively, that also then returns to the page.
This is absolutely blowing my mind! Andy there are awesome references, and not to mention amazing tools in general. I can plug any information I want into this tool. I am floored.
I have to disagree with you here. The way I look at stuff (not only SEO) is to reason why stuff would work and why it wouldn’t. All algorithms are based on reasoning and therefore search engines can only function well if they make sense.
This idea that outbound links cause your pages to leak PR just doesn’t make sense. If this were actually true, Google knows that there will be a lot of people that will just stop linking out. Their algorithm is based largely on the power of links. Why would they risk the basis of their existence? I don’t see a logical explanation to this idea of outgoing links leaking PR.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but the only thing your demonstration proves is that webworkshop has an interesting application on their website. The basis for this app is derived reasoning (actually it’s from the patent application and they say themselves that Google probably modified it in the meantime) based on a theory. Change the theory and the app is useless.
The earliest thread on any website I could find about this subject was of 2002 and apparently they had been discussing it for a while at that point as well. If you do a search (on any engine) on this subject you’ll find a plethora of results and almost everything is speculation.
As you know Google and its spokespeople are relatively open, but there are some things that they don’t give comprehensive answers to. The exact workings of the PR algo is one of these. I think Matt Cutts actually enjoys the fact that all these people are writhing in agony when he says something about “sucking PR” or something similar and then doesn’t reply to the million questions he gets about that remark.
The only clear mention I’ve found about how outbound links affect a page’s PR was by Vanessa Fox on googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com. I quote:
I must say that what she says makes a lot of sense to me so I am more inclined to go with her on this. But everybody is entitled to his/her own opinion and I don’t think we can ever be sure about this until we work at a search engine.
Garry, my reply got stuck in your spam filter. Too many outgoing links? LOL
Maybe I didn’t understand the question. What I am saying is that:
1. The pagerank of the page you link out from does NOT lose pagerank when you link out to other pages.
2. The page rank of the other pages on your site WILL NOT get as much page rank juice when you link out to a lot of other sites.
3. I could care less about pagerank.
4. Page rank is a very small factor in how your site gets ranked.
5. If you rely on Google or any other ONE site for most or all of your traffic, then you have a problem. Google or any other web company should not be able to determine how you run your business. No company and/or government should have so much control over the web that they can tell you what to do with your business. They don’t own the web.
Yes, there are basic BLATANT things you should do to keep from being banned or SANDBOXED. These things tend to make some common sense. Build a great site and promote it. That is the simple way to get the Search Engines to love you.
6. Google is my friend. I like Google. However, I will not fear them. They don’t own the web, they don’t own my websites.
7. Yahoo is my friend and so is Microsoft, etc. They don’t own the web either.
This is all my opinion, I may certainly be incorrect in my thinking.
Very nice demonstration Andy.
Andy,
How important do you think page rank is for SEO purposes?
All the best,
George
In number 1 above, I wasn’t really taking into account the effect of the other pages linking back to the page. It is true that the page rank of that page can go down when you link out to other sites… if you have other pages on your site linking back to that page (which is usually the case). Thanks again Andy for the demo.
This is a more comprehensive reply than your shorter one
Thanks.
Ad.1: I’m gonna respond to Andy’s reply above in a minute on this issue
Ad.2: I agree with you there. I think PR is passed based on several factors and one of them is probably the amount if links on the page. If you have one link then that one passes all the PR there is to pass. If you have 10 links on that page you can probably roughly divide the available PR to pass by 10 and that’s the PR being passed. Although I can imagine that there is also the question of relevance of the receiving page compared to the giving page and/or anchor text.
Ad.3: Agreeing with you again. It remains an interesting metric though, if only as a conversation piece
Ad.4: Relevance is where it’s at! We’re outranking several websites with higher PR on, to us, important keywords.
Ad.5: No, Google does not own the web, not is Google the web. But they’re a darn important piece of it. About 60% of our traffic comes from Google and I wouldn’t want to lose this. If you look at the value of Google to your business it’s phenomenal and if you have a commercial business you would be foolish to discount them. I’d say: work with them within reason. Don’t do anything that doesn’t feel right to you and your business, but try to rank high because it just makes sense.
Ad.6: Agree
Ad.7: I like Yahoo, but am not a fan of live search. When it comes to finding what I need I usually get better results on Google than on the other ones. That’s what counts for me
Hi Joost, Thanks for that feedback you wrote George, but I do have a question about it. You said that posts with a lot of comments can be seen as link farms. But wouldn’t someone like Google be able to determine the difference between a link farm and a post that’s just doing great?
Admittedly, relevance is important and I agree with you that just because a post is generating a lot of comments doesn’t ensure that relevance to those comments exist. However, if a blogger is responsible to remove said content from those comments (or the comments themselves), then you’re left with a page with relevance, new content (what SEs like to see) and, I would imagine, greater authority for the blog. Your thoughts?
@Garry: I have to say that this has been a very enjoyable post to watch. I’ve learned a lot?
Hi Mark,
The ‘problem’ with search engines is that they’re not someone, but something. They are just algorithms that deduce something based on information on a website. So, you need to help them in making informed deductions or risk being misunderstood (that’s my opinion, see the discussion with George). They’ve gotten a lot better at what they do over the last few years, but they’re still just zeros and ones.
As for relevance: of course the webmaster has to keep an eye out on the quality of the comments. Take a look at, for instance, http://www.problogger.net and tell me the percentage of comments that have this format “Hi Darren, great post. Love your info, John”. These comments are ‘relevant’, but not really ‘relevant!!!’ and they do have that link there. Imagine now that all those links are followed….
I do think it is true that a post with a lot of comments improves the importance and interestingness (is that a word?) of a post. And it also means that the post is fresh for a longer time even with the “Hi x, great post”-comments.
So just make sure you link to A list bloggers who have registered their domain for 10 years (so it doesn’t end up as a domain holding page)
Google are going to look at an overall link profile for a site - if you have linked out to 1000s of other bloggers from your content, you would have a hell of a job checking them out down the line.
Spammers used to slip bad links into Wikipedia, they still do for traffic. You don’t see Wikipedia, or in fact any site get banned for a couple of links that have gone bad.
The 100 links per page is old hat, though I don’t have a Matt Cutts reference to hand
Hi Andy, so what about places like Mashable, TechCrunch, and the like? Since they specialize in pointing to other sites, they’ll eventually (probably already do?) have 1000s links. So are you saying that Google will consider this overall link profile or are you saying that it would just be difficult for the blog owner/webmaster to check on those links? Or perhaps both?
Lets think about something even bigger
Squidoo is filled with Parasitic Internet marketers who link to all kinds of sites which may or may not exist in the future.
If someone checked every single link leaving Squidoo, I am sure there are a few that link to less desirable places (with or without the knowledge of the lens owner), yet it is well known that Squidoo has a lot of authority in ranking
I check out the sites of people who comment - maybe if someone has 100 comments on every post that becomes a chore, but then they are making enough money to have someone check all the links from their domain, or buy/develop a tool to do it for them if it ever becomes a problem.
I know plenty of PR7 blogs that have some form of Dofollow in use, including a few that even appear in your Wordpress admin console.
The worst danger for a blogger to have their site tanked is being hijacked, but people seem more worried about a single link than their site being redirected to disreputable sites.
You are all running Wordpress 2.2.1 and have daily backups?
Hi Andy,
I’m not sayi