David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing

Over the years, Google has been telling webmasters to avoid manipulating their content and links to try to gain higher rankings. The advice has usually been along the lines of, “Do what is good for your readers.” In other words, we should should ask ourselves, “Would I do this if Google did not exist?”

Of course, spamming has worked, at least in the short term. That is why people have continued to do it. And Google has waged a guerrilla warfare with spammers over the years.

But people could always get ahead as long as they made it look like they were doing things just for their readers. In other words, as long as it looked natural, and not automated.

• If they were careful to vary the link text.
• If they were careful not to have a thousand identical articles with the same resource box.
• If they avoided link-exchange scripts.
• If their content was “technically” unique (not the same content with just a couple words changed or synonyms substituted).

All that changed in what I call Google’s “Zoo Period“. Google unleashed pandas and penguins on the world, two black and white animals we usually associate with the words “cute” and “cuddly”.  But Google’s penguins and pandas are anything but cute and cuddly.

These two algorithms are delivering a hard strike at spammers.  The problem that everybody notices, however, is so much collateral damage of innocent websites and in particular that the small guy seems to be hit more than the big brands.

The problem that few people are talking about openly  is…

Webmasters are doing stupid things to please Google

Google’s advice that we should be creating web content for our readers, not for Google, is wise – at least in theory.

The problem is, that Google is now penalizing those very activities that we should be doing to make great websites for our readers.  Here are a few examples that I have noticed.

Content stuffing

Once upon a time, keyword stuffing was a big problem.  This was when people would just cram their keywords into their pages at an unnatural rate in order to gain an advantage in the search engines.  It made for hard-to-read pages.  People don’t do this too much any more; it no longer is considered effective.

Instead, they do content stuffing.

It seems that early results show that “thin content” (not many words on a page) can get a page into trouble with Google.  Worse still, several pages of “thin content” have been shown to drag down an entire domain. So webmasters and bloggers are rushing out in droves to beef up thin content pages, which typically would be any image-heavy page or blog posts with fewer than 100 or 200 words.  On one of my blogs, I have deleted a lot of old posts that were incredibly small.  Those posts were small for a reason, but they are gone now.  Others I have beefed up.

The problem that any writer worth her salt will immediately recognize, is that you cannot equate quality with word count.  In fact, a good writer seeks to streamline her content and use only those words that are absolutely necessary to convey the message.

“Brevity is the soul of wit.” So says William Shakespeare.

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” So says Friedrich Nietzsche

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” So says Thomas Jefferson

“Stuff it!” So says Google?

 

So the Internet is being again polluted by low-quality content, just to keep it all above Google’s word-count penalty threshhold.  Will this finally be the end of all those Wordless Wednesday blog posts?  Will I have to add a whole lot of extra verbiage to posts like this, where the video pretty much says it all?  Or to posts like this where a picture is worth a thousand words (if only Google could read pictures)?

Retired shotguns

In any marketing campaign, you have three choices.

1. You can use the rifle or sniper approach, narrowly defining your target audience and delivering a message directly to them, for their eyes only.  If your market is very small and very well-defined, such as if you manufacture street signs or oxygen dispensers for hospitals, this is usually the best choice.

2. You can use the shotgun approach, spreading your message as far and wide as possible hoping to reach the largest possible market.  This is ideal if you are selling a consumer product that appeals to a wide section of the population, particularly if it has appeal across all ages, genders and income levels.

3. You can use some combination of the rifle and the shotgun.

Once upon a time, before Google was a household name, people used to do article marketing that encouraged syndication.  The idea was the more websites published your article, the more people would see it and the more potential visitors you would get.

If you could blast your article to 1000 websites for the same amount of effort as to one or two websites, who cares if nobody saw the article on half the websites.  What counted is that some people saw it on some of the websites some of the time.  If the article was rubbish, it was just web pollution.  If the article was riveting, the shotgun would pull in traffic.

If you’ve been around long enough, you might recall ads to “post your ad on 1000 websites”.  Again, the shotgun approach.  You have no idea which of those websites are actually worth posting on.  Maybe 10 of them will bring you traffic.  But if the cost is $25 and you end up making more than that from just one of the sites, already you have positive ROI.  This has nothing to do with search engines, by the way.  And this would never have made you rich.  But it is/was a legitimate part of a shotgun approach to marketing.

You can’t do that anymore.

No more syndication

Even before the Penguin, people were panicking over “duplicate” content and “spinning” their articles so that each instance of the article would be “unique”, at least in the sequence of words it would use.

But now, the matter of spinning versus duplicate content is a moot point.  Now the Penguin will bite you for all the low-quality websites linking back to your website.

Google has plugged the shotgun, so that now it backfires and injures webmasters!

What a mess!

The problem is that if you have an amazing article, it makes perfect sense to get it syndicated as widely as possible.  If posting it to one article directory brings in five great leads and posting it to another brings in three great leads, good business sense dictates that you should syndicate it as far and wide as possible.  You want to include instructions on your site saying, “Please copy my articles, with attribution and a link.”

The problem is that Google will get you for the duplicate content.

Then the Penguin will stomp all over you for the poor quality links.

Verbose blog comments

What’s next?  Already I am hearing the chatter about blog comments.  People are asking whether we have to make sure our comments are long enough?  I know that a lot of spam comments are short: “Nice site”.  But other spam comments are long-winded, such as this drivel I just pulled from the moderation queue:

“I actually wanted to type a brief word so as to express gratitude to you for some of the pleasant guidelines you are writing at this website. My extended internet look up has finally been rewarded with wonderful tips to go over with my guests. I ‘d assume that most of us visitors are unequivocally blessed to dwell in a very good place with so many perfect individuals with helpful secrets. I feel very much privileged to have encountered your entire web site and look forward to some more cool times reading here. Thanks once more for everything.”

When I leave comments, sometimes I am long-winded.  And sometimes I am short-winded.  Here are three examples I left on three different posts of the same blog, over time.

 

 

 

How long a comment depends on how complex a remark one wants to leave.  It is not a sign of quality but of complexity.  Hopefully this will never be a concern, but if current trends continue, it won’t be long before the next black and white animal comes charging out of the Googleplex to cause mayhem on the Internet.

 

People spend a lot of time scratching their heads, trying to understand how Google reads their backlinks.  They want to know what links they should seek to their websites that are still “safe”.

With all the turmoil over unnatural links and Penguin penalties over the past year or two, ever more people are sorting through their backlink profiles trying to understand which links to keep and which to try to cull.  What confuses many people the most is why some links would be valued over others.  “Why doesn’t Google like the links I worked so hard to build?”

The problem is that people are used to assuming that:

• Every link is good.
• High PageRank is what counts the most
• Automation is good, because more is better.

These are wrong assumptions.  Remember that Google looks at each link to your website as a vote of confidence or a recommendation.  And not all recommendations are of equal value.  For instance, suppose you need headache medication…

 

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If one person recommends a headache medication, you might be inclined to try it. But if several people recommend a different headache medication…yes, exactly.  More is better.

But wait!  What if a doctor recommends a different headache medication.  Yup, authority trumps quantity.  And if several doctors recommend a completely different headache medication…exactly!  More is better, after all, especially when it comes with authority.

Now, what if the drug pusher around the corner offers his recommendation?  No thanks.  But what if a dozen drug pushers all recommend the same headache medication?  Of course you’ll take their advice, because more is better, right?

No way!

And Google is at least as smart as you are.  If hundreds of spammy sites link to your website, that is not a better recommendation than if one spammy website links to yours.  The more “drug pusher” websites recommend your website, the more likely Google is to label your website…

So, just as you would not want a throng of drug pushers recommending your product, make sure there is no throng of spammy websites recommending your website. Google will see more value in your website if inbound links come from trusted or – even better – highly trusted sources.

Something occurred to me as I sat in church the other day.  For those readers who worship in synagogues or mosques or some other temple, I suspect you will relate to this just as well.

I was watching people enter and file into their pews.  I was noticing how well they were dressed.  Most people dress up to go to church.

They will tend to wear better clothes than for a day around the house or even to go shopping.

They will make sure their hair is just right, almost as if preparing for a date.

They tend to shave just before the service.

Looks are important.  Outward appearance is important.  This might be to honor God, but of course it is not for God’s sake that we do this.  We do this for each other and for ourselves.  People dress well for people.

When God looks at us, it is not through ocular vision.  If God notes our color coordination, it is not on that basis that we are judged. (at least, I hope not, or I am in deep, deep trouble!).

If God notes our hair to be clean or greasy, it is not on that basis that we are judged.

If God notes that we have shaved or failed to do so, it is not on that basis that we are judged.

Nice people can look scruffy.  Evil villains can look sharp.  God looks past the external looks. He ignores the hair, the clothes, the cologne.  He sees what we are really made of.

What does this have to do with Google?

What does all this have to do with Google?  Well, many people do grumble that Google has a God complex, that it is so powerful that one wave of its hand can smote a business.  And to a great degree, that is true.

But sitting in church, it occurred to me that Google plays God in another way, too.  Google looks at your website on the Internet that same way as God looks at you in church (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Google might note that your website has a flash presentation, but no matter how fancy it is, it is not on that basis that your website is judged.

Google might note that your website has several images, but no matter how elaborate they are, it is not on that basis that your website is judged.

Great websites can look boring, even amateurish.  Trashy splogs can be dressed up fancy.  Google looks past the visual. Google ignores images and layout for the most part.  Google sees what our websites are really made of – the code, the content, the information.

The Google Sermon

You don’t need me to tell you that you should be a good person – patient, generous, forgiving, nice to other people, to animals and to the planet.  I don’t need to repeat the Sermon on the Mount

It is fine to dress up nicely.  Nothing wrong with that, so long as we make sure our inside is nice, that what really counts is attended to.

It is equally fine to dress up our websites nicely.  Pay attention to white space, to fonts, to images, to layout.  Make the site look pretty, professional, inviting.

Nothing wrong with that, so long as we make sure what is behind the external image is nice.  That the code is clean.  That the structure makes sense to Google and other search engines.  That the information is all there, easy to find, easy to understand.  That there is plenty of content, on-topic, not playing with hidden text or keyword stuffing or any of those unforgivable sins of SEO.

Of course, Google is not God.  But clearly Google is trying to emulate God.  So make sure that your website is emulating the faithful worshipper.

Now let us take a moment to pray for those websites that have fallen from grace…

 

I was asked the following question recently about Google: “I still don’t understand how other sites post articles that are not original yet they do not get penalized?”

I am sure you have been asked this question many times.  Maybe you have asked it yourself many times.  I have certainly heard it posed in many different ways, why one site gets Panda slapped or Penguin slapped and not another.  As an SEO consultant myself, I have been amazed at how one site with a fairly good link profile, but with some “unnatural” links can get Google’s dreaded “unnatural links letter“, while another site with a much more questionable link profile doesn’t.

But sometimes you have to hear a question posed in many ways, many times before you get that Aha! moment when The Obvious Answer is revealed.  This was that moment.

The Obvious Answer

The Obvious Answer is actually a question: Why do some smokers live 100 years, while others are struck down by lung cancer at 43 or 47 or 54?

It’s just not fair.

Which bring us to the second part of The Obvious Answer: Life is not fair (as I keep telling my kids every time one of them screams out “It’s not fair!”)  And neither is Google.

Let’s review what Google’s ranking goal is, which I can assure you has nothing to do with fairness.  Google’s goal is to provide searchers with what will be most useful to them.  We use search engines to find what we want; Google does its best to deliver.  It does not always succeed (although it obviously does well enough, or we would all be using some other search engine).

My brother, the human search engine

I am reminded now of the purchasing habits of one of my brothers.  Once he takes an interest in buying something, he does endless research.  He is determined to find the best price.  He is determined to find the best features.  He is determined to find the most durable option.

But most of all, he is determined not to discover six days after buying something, that there is could have been an even slightly better option that he missed.

As a result, he often gets better deals than I do.  It’s not fair.

But even with all his research and delaying, he still might not get the very best option.  It’s not fair.

Which means that a vendor or manufacturer with something slightly better might still have missed a sale.  It’s not fair.

And that also means that a vendor or manufacturer got a sale he might not have gotten.  It’s not fair (but they are not complaining, right?).

And when Google ranks web pages, it’s not fair.  And it is not meant to be.  Google’s job, to once again restate the often overlooked or ignored obvious, is to provide searchers with what will be most useful to them.

What SEO is all about

So the job of SEO practitioners is…

Come on, what is the obvious answer?

You can do it.

To make sure our websites are the most useful to searchers.

Now I know that you will say that it is the designer’s and programmer’s jobs to make sure the website is most useful, functioning well, converting well, etc.  True enough.  But it is the SEO’s job to make sure that, for a given search term, the site actually delivers.  Obviously there is some overlap and cooperation required with the designer and the programmer on the technical front, but mostly the SEO needs to make sure the content is what searchers are looking for.

Relevant.

Important.

And, above all, useful.

And the SEO consultant has one additional job, besides making sure the content is most useful – and this is key – making sure the search engines know the content is the most useful.  It is about writing.  It is also about promoting. Yes, all the “content is king” and “quality over quantity” and “avoiding bad neighbourhoods” and “backlink strategies” can be distilled down to this very simple goal.

But what happens if Google doesn’t notice the right things?  What happens if Google does notice the wrong things?  What happens if somebody else is shouting louder?  What happens if someone else makes a more useful web page?  What if Google disagrees that your perfect page is best?

Like I said, it’s not fair.  It’s not supposed to be.  That is The Obvious Answer.

The Practical Answer

Of course, if you’ve been hit be a penalty, such as the “unnatural links letter” or just been demoted by a Penguin slap or hit by Google’s brand new EMD (exact match domain) artillery, and find yourself grumbling that it’s not fair, you will probably find “It’s not supposed to be.” a less than satisfying answer.

It is also a less than practical answer.

The practical answer is to avoid doing anything that the search engines might one day decide is spammy.  Yes, that is a whopper.

And quite impossible.

Once upon a time, you could not be penalized by who linked to you, only by who you linked to.  This made sense; it kept competitors from building piles of spammy links to your site – “negative SEO”.  But with Google’s Penguin and the “unnatural links letter”, times have changed.  Despite Google’s protests to the contrary, I cannot see how negative SEO can be stopped right now.

Not long ago, any publicity was good publicity.  If you could get a mention in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, that was amazing.  Still is.

But if you couldn’t get that kind of coverage, you could still spread your message through blog networks, article submissions, etc.  Much less targeted, much lower quality, much more of a shot in the dark.  But 100 percent legitimate.  Sometimes you market with a rifle, sometimes with a shotgun.  Fair enough?

But now if you market with a shotgun, Google will look at all those low quality repetitive links and down the sink goes your website.  No, it’s not fair.  Especially since it is retroactive, penalizing your site for doing in the past what used to make sense back then (and still would make sense if you don’t care about Google rankings).

So it is not always possible to predict what will get you in trouble, but it is pretty clear that quality over quantity is a good rule of thumb.  Stay away from anything mass-produced or mass-disseminated.  Avoid any get-rich-quick (get-links-quick) tactics.  Take the time to create original content – truly original content, not just rehashed repetition.

You still might get tripped up by suddenly changing algorithms.  Watch how Infographics get treated in a year or two. You still might find yourself at some point in the future grumbling “It’s not fair.”  But your odds of being on the winning side of the not-fairness will be much, much greater.

Additional advice? Hang on tight!

 

 

…as experienced by more webmasters than I care to count:

Oh, yes. And this is how many of those same webmasters would like to deal with Google’s penguin (sorry, but you do have to watch the full 1:47 video to the end to see the full wrath of the webmasters).

Google AdWords is the perfect way for you to reach more members of your target audience online. When you create an account, you’re immediately given $100 worth of free credits. With this amount, you can instantly post ads that millions of people around the world can view. While this is a great thing, it also means that you can easily spend tons of money on your online marketing campaign without yielding a return on your investment.

Below are a few concepts that you should know so that AdWords advertising will become more effective for your business.

Keyword Research

This is to help you figure out what search terms users are entering to find you and other similar businesses, you may use one of the many free or proprietary keyword tools out there. Utilize those tools to create a good list of short and long-tail targeted keywords that will broaden your reach.

A final tip on keyword research is to remember that AdWords is a prime space for ads. This means that you’ll have to compete with others in terms of relevancy to searches. The way to win is to set a fixed budget and look for keywords that won’t cost you so much per click. Remember, that there are other keywords that your competitors haven’t exploited yet. If you only choose popular keywords, you’ll find yourself strapped on cash.

Keyword Matching

When you input your key phrases into AdWords, you’ll be given three matching options. Let’s say that your keyword is “wooden doors.”

• Broad Match. This tells Google to match the searches that it thinks are relevant to your ads. Don’t get surprised if Google decides to match “glass doors” to your ads.

• Phrase Match. If you choose this, Google will match your ads to searches using your key phrase in its exact form and sequence. Using the example above, Google will match your ads with “etched wooden doors” but not with “wooden front doors.”

• Exact Match. With this option, Google will display your ad in searches that strictly matches your phrase. For instance, your ad will only be shown if someone searches for “wooden doors” and no other words.

 Negative Keywords

 Apart from the three keyword matching options above, there’s negative match, which tells Google NOT to display your ad for searches containing keywords you specify.

Quality Score

Your Quality Score is Google’s estimate of the relevance and usefulness of your keywords, advertisements, and landing pages to viewers. If you score high, your ads will rank better, additionally, your clicks will be cheaper meaning more savings for you.

Focused Ad Groups

Grouping together highly-specific targeted words with the same theme is one of the crucial steps to AdWords success. By doing so, you can track your bids and conversions better. When you know how a certain cluster of keywords are performing, you can put them on hold in order to bring your PPC spending down.

Ads Written for Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) refers to the number of actual clicks on your ad per one hundred impressions (i.e. number of users who see your ad regardless if they click-through or not).

General keywords definitely create a lot of impressions, but result in lower click-throughs and conversions because they won’t filter your audience. Targeted keywords, on the other hand, will have a better CTR with less impressions.

If you want to improve your ads’ CTR, you should avoid very general search terms. It’s better to focus on specific keywords that more closely describe your products/services.

Position Preferences

Before, you can specify whether you want your ad to appear at the top of the page or “other” (i.e. side or bottom). But in April 2011, Google retired this option so ad owners have to optimize their AdWords accounts manually to target a specific position. An excellent way of doing this is by focusing on ads’ quality scores in order to not only drive down your PPC costs, but also improve your ranking. But should you determine that the top spot isn’t for you, since your ads are already earning is enough, then you should stick with your conservative keywords.

Targeting Search Network vs. Content Network

When you register for an AdWords account, you’ll eventually have to specify whether you want to advertise on the Search Network, Content Network, or both. Choosing content network means that your ads will be placed inside websites relevant to your keywords. Selecting search network means that your ads will be found on Google SERPs.

It would be better if you avoided Content Network because it will only bring in traffic that’s not qualified. For instance, if your website is about coffee beans, your ad can get placed in a site that’s about a song containing the phrase “coffee beans.” Because your ad isn’t relevant to the content of that site, you won’t get any traffic from it and hence your conversion rates will suffer.

Creating the perfect Adwords campaign requires constant monitoring to make the best use of your marketing dollar. With a keen attention to what works and what doesn’t, you can drive down costs and raise your CTR to improve the bottom line for your online sales.

This is a guest post by Michael Hendsbee of Convurgency SEO Toronto.

 

Google Doodles, beware! Today I will share with you an exclusive radio interview with Rankless Jones*, live at the scene of the “Occupy Google” protests.  After all, why occupy just a street, when you can occupy an entire website?

 

 

If Plan “B” is initiated, here are some of the unfortunate Google Doodles that we believe might be at risk, and are advised to take security precautions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can decide for yourself which Google Doodles are most likely to fall victim to the Occupy Google protests if the demands are not met, by visiting the Google Doodle Archive.

*Rankless Jones played by Chantalyne Leonhardt in her first international voice acting role.

Not every website is a WordPress blog.  That’s a pity, because WordPress has so many handy plugins.  SocialFloat is NOT a WordPress plugin – and that is good news if your website is not a WordPress blog, because this is for the rest of us.

You will surely have noticed on so many WordPress blogs a column of social voting buttons on the right or left of the page (see the right hand side of this page, for example).  These “float”, because even as you scroll down the page, they stay in the same place on your screen.  This makes it easy to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc.

 

 

That’s what Social Float does.  It encourages your visitors to share your content by keeping the share buttons constantly on their screens.  Why is this important?

• You can generate a lot of traffic through Twitter and Facebook.
• The search engines are paying attention to what pages and what websites get more shares and tweets, so it is important for SEO.
• Your visitors don’t want to have to search for a share button all over your pages.
• Your competitors on WordPress are using tools like this; you need to keep up.

I am making this social sharing widget available absolutely free.  You can download SocialFloat here.  You will get the exact code with clear and precise beta-tested instructions that even a relative newbie can add to their website.

Yeah, I thought that title would grab you.  Google announced a new extension to its Chrome browser, an extension that could truly rock the SEO World.  The extension does two things:

1. It enables searchers to block domains from search results.
2. It tells Google what domains have just been blocked.

Says Google anti-spam spokesman Matt Cutts, ” If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.”

This blog post will tell you exactly how to preserve and enhance your search engine rankings in a world where users can send explicit feedback (this Chrome extension is neither the first tool for explicit feedback, nor will it be the last; but it might just be the most powerful, so far).

I should make it clear that I was always a big believer is both explicit and implicit user feedback.  The search engines would be fools not to pay attention to which sites please their visitors when serving up sites to new searchers.

It was just over two years ago that I released Sticky SEO, essentially detailing how you can keep more visitors longer on your website, going deeper into the site.  For the most part, this means pleasing more visitors even more than you already do, since that is what Google looks for.

So what do you do with this Chrome extension?  Well, you want to please your visitors so that they don’t swear, curse and block your domain.

PROBLEM # 1: FREE LOADERS

There are a lot of people searching for free stuff on the Internet.  You don’t give your stuff away free, but the “free loaders” show up at your website.  “What?  They want a million bucks to dig a hole to China?  I want someone to do it for free.  Bloody rip-off scammers.  Block, block, block.”

There are probably not too many people searching for “dig a hole to China” and expecting free service.  Nor are there many people expecting to get new shoes for free.  Nor gourmet coffee or gift baskets.  Nor metal buildings or intercontinental pipeline installation.  Not even free tattoos or body piercing. But there many niches that include freebie searchers,  for example…

• website templates
• resume help
• music downloads
• ringtones
• online games
• learn Spanish

How do you make sure that people searching for freebies don’t block your website when they discover that you are one of those evil profit-seeking cannibals who wants to feed your family?  You give them what they want, of course.  You add something free to your site.  You give them a free option, or you link to a free option.  Somehow, you make sure you please them.  Remember what your mother said?  “You can never go wrong being nice to someone.”  Well, she should have said that.

PROBLEM # 2: GENERALISTS

Let’s say you sell a very specific item or service that is part of a bigger niche, but people don’t search all that specifically.  In Sticky SEO, on page 14 (until I eventually get around to updating it), I tell the tale of a client who wanted to revamp its website back in 2006.  They sold commercial fitness equipment, but their clients would search just for “fitness equipment”.  The problem was that ten times as many people looking for home gyms also searched for “fitness equipment”.

Life would be easy if people searched for “home fitness equipment”  or “commercial fitness equipment”, but life wasn’t meant to be easy.  What would they do about all this traffic from generalist searchers?

Please them, of course.  Remember what your mother said?  “You can never go wrong being nice to someone.”  Like I said, she should have said that…especially if she knew Google was going to give all those people an easy way to block your domain and tell Google your site sucks.

How to please those generalists?  No point in reprinting page 14 here.  You can read it for yourself.  (Hey, it’s a free download.  Did you think this was a sneaky sales pitch or something?)

PROBLEM # 3: EVILDOERS

Yes, the world is an evil place if you look at it right.  Google’s motto is “Do no evil” (or something like that.  But they never said anything about not arming your competition to do evil, did they?  How much do you want to bet that across the Internet’s freelancer markets there will be an SEO arms trade: “100 domain blocks for $15 – from separate IPs in over 20 countries”?  Maybe for $25, who knows?

So how do you deal with that?  No inbound link is supposed to hurt your rankings, so that your competition can’t spam you out of the search results.  But what if a coordinated group of offshore outsourcing in China and India and Greenland gang up on you?

Sorry, I don’t have an answer for you on this one.  But I am sure Matt Cutts will be asked about it sooner or later, and maybe he will have an answer.  Hopefully.

Earlier this year, I speculated on how the search engines treat NoFollow links.  For those who might be a little green, NoFollow links are not totally ignored by the search engines.  For those who really, really green, NoFollow links are believed to be totally ignored by the search engines (because they have the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the link code).

So we ran a little experiment. 

A client of ours had a fully developed website that has never been used.  Not a single link points to this website, so in the eyes of the search engines, it should not exist. 

It was not indexed at Yahoo. It should go without saying that Yahoo displayed no backlinks.

The site was indexed at Google.  (How, why and whether Google should index orphan sites that have not been released to the public is a topic for another post.) Google showed no backlinks, but the site did rank #8 at Google for one very important search, based primarily on the name of the domain. It did not show up in the top 100 for a few other key searches. All searches are for local terms specific to a certain city, so they are moderately low competition.

For three weeks, we posted comments on NoFollow blogs (yes, intelligent comments reflecting the specific content of the blog posts) to create a steady stream of NoFollow links, without creating any DoFollow or “normal” hyperlinks.

Were the NoFollow links followed?

At the end of week 4, we found Yahoo had indexed the website and showed 51 backlinks.  All of these are NoFollow links. The more important searches were all showing in the top 20, one as high as position #6. Remember that these are moderately low-competition, local searches, but this is all on the strength of a few weeks of exclusively NoFollow links.

Google showed no backlinks after 4 weeks.  No surprise there; Google is very sporadic with if, when, how and which sampling of backlinks it chooses to display. The ranking at position #8 had not changed, but a couple other search terms were now ranking at Google, one of them as high as position #11. Again, this is exclusively on the strength of NoFollow blog comments.

What can we conclude about NoFollow links?

NoFollow links still obviously count at Yahoo.  Do they count as much as DoFollow links?  A more complicated experiment might help answer that question.  Anyone feel like taking up the challenge?

NoFollow links also appear to count at Google.  Or perhaps some do and others don’t, depending on other factors Google might use to rate links from specific domains. However, we can be sure that Google does follow at least some NoFollow links.

The conclusion I would draw from this is that people really should not focus on the NoFollow/DoFollow issue. Build links that are officially followable when you can, but don’t let a NoFollow attribute in a page’s links dissuade you from creating a link you would otherwise pursue.