Internet Business Blog

Ever since its inception in January 2005, the (now infamous) nofollow attribute has caused quite a stir amongst webmasters. When applied to an outbound link, it’s a method of restricting the benefit that link provides to the destination website.

At a very basic level, direct hyperlinks usually offer two types of benefit to the website being linked to:

1. As a recommendation or vote in the eyes of a search engine thereby boosting the apparent popularity of the website being linked to.
2. As a source of visitor traffic as people click through from the linking website.

Developed to tackle the growing problem of people deliberately abusing the popularity benefit by placing junk comments with links on other peoples blogs, the big three search engines (Google, MSN, and Yahoo!) quickly agreed to support the nofollow attribute to a degree.

Wikipedia has a write-up on how it’s thought the different search engines respond to the nofollow attribute. Whether or not it’s an accurate representation of the truth is anyone’s guess.

The nofollow attribute isn’t unique to blogs, however, and webmasters can no longer turn a blind eye or plead ignorance to what websites they’re linking to as these search engines have placed the responsibility for using the nofollow attribute squarely with them and it’s not difficult to see why. Since it’s the webmasters who control the websites, they also control the links too.

As well as a means of controlling the dispersion of search ranking boosting benefit to external websites, Google have also indicated that it can be used for internal links. From SEOmoz,

Rand Fishkin: Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love?

Matt Cutts: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages

So what does the nofollow attribute mean to you?

Well, if you link to a website from your own website then you’re expected to use the nofollow attribute such that paid links are clearly identified as such to search engines who can then treat them according to their own policies. Practically, that means changing your links from this,

<a href="http://www.example.com/">Visit My Website</a>

to

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Visit My Website</a>

So, for example, if you sell text links on your website then you are expected to apply the nofollow attribute to any links sold. The consequences of not doing so and being found out can mean some form of penalty being applied e.g. black flagging your website so that no links provide any search engine benefit. That’s not to say that this is actually what happens, but you should be aware that it’s possible.

If you’re using website software such as WordPress then you may already be using the nofollow attribute without realising as some applications come pre-programmed to apply it to certain links. WordPress, for example, applies the nofollow attribute to all links in comments.

If you’re a webmaster who purchases links for their search engine benefit then you should be aware that some link sellers will follow the nofollow guidelines set by the search engines so always consider the traffic benefit that a link can provide.

There are plenty of people who think that the likes of Google are asking for too much control of how websites are run and have taken steps to defy such restriction, for example, by installing the Dofollow plugin for their WordPress blog.

Do you think nofollow affects you? Do search engines have the right to set such guidelines for webmasters? Do they have the right to issue penalties if their guidelines aren’t adhered to?

Technorati Tags: nofollow, dofollow, Google, MSN, Yahoo

Today, I received an email newsletter from Text Link Ads, part of which read,

If you are ready for an ad that can drive traffic and raise your natural search engine rankings head on over to TLA now

If I ran a search engine and I was aiming to deliver the most relevant results to my users then I’d also be concerned about people trying to take advantage of the careful developed ranking algorithms I’d put in place.

Whilst some websites using paid links might deserve a rankings boost i.e. they’re relevant for user search terms, but perhaps don’t yet have enough back-links to lift them into the limelight of the first three pages, paid links allow any website with a marketing budget to get those improvements regardless of whether or not they’re deserved.

Back-links are a handy natural voting system. Using back-links as votes may not be the perfect voting system, but it’s very effective. Is paying for votes any more ethical on the Internet than it is in the real world?

Technorati Tags: Paid links, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, TLA

An essential part of any search engine marketing campaign, I find, is to have accurate and up-to-date website statistics available. Not only does having this information tell me and my clients how the website is performing in an SEO context, but it also helps to map out how it should be promoted in the future.

What isn’t very helpful is when websites are hosted with 3rd party hosts who don’t update statistics frequently enough. For example, one of my clients has their website hosted by Register.com, a big name on the web, and yet their statistics (based upon Webalizer) are only updated on a monthly basis. Not only that, but they’re kept in a publicly accessible directory. Talk about stone age!

If I were stuck with that level of service then I’d be making changes very rapidly. Not being able to see the effect of changes on a daily basis means that I’d effectively be flying blind for the most part. By the time my statistics were updated, an opportunity could be lost.

I haven’t used Google Analytics (GA) up until now, but I have used Urchin before and found it to be very useful. I only stopped using Urchin when my hosts stopped providing it and then I switched to AWStats which is bundled with most cPanel-based hosting. In the case of this particular client, I’m going to explore the possibility of installing the GA software and being able to take advantage of this free software.

Technorati Tags: Google Analytics, website statistics, urchin, webalizer, awstats, hosting

By now, the world and his dog are aware of Google acquiring FeedBurner and offering their previously paid services for free.

Well, I’m not going to make you read any more of what you already know, but one thing I did find interesting is that the deal may open up Google’s bag of secrets.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Google PageRank shuffle has been under way for a few days now and you can almost feel the tremors rippling through the blogosphere.

This blog has experienced a PageRank drop from 5 to 4, along with another of my ex-PR5 websites which used to feature a PR6 inner page.

It seems I’m not alone as Stu’s PR has also dropped from 4 to 3 (a lack of pimping, Stu?) and Burt’s dropped from 5 to 4.

Besides scuffing my pride, does this drop have any other impact on my life? Not really although in the eyes of some, the ‘value‘ of this website may have decreased.

Fortunately, my online income generating capability doesn’t revolve around PageRank. Does yours?

Technorati Tags: Google PageRank Update