I can understand why Matt Cutts might want to change what noindex does, it is not just Koreans making occasional mistakes, for instance I just noticed the whole WebProNews video blog is currently noindex nofollow. I am sure that is a mistake, it is easy to make in WordPress… just one click and save.

All in one plugins are dangerous if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve

Rel-nofollow, meta instructions and robots.txt are just tools.

Just because a tool is available to use in your toolbox, doesn’t mean you should use it. You don’t always need to use a big hammer to repair a TV set though sometimes a big hammer just isn’t big enough ;)

Inclusive PageRank Sculpting

Whilst I agree with Michael that nofollow has a purpose and I use it as a tool to achieve desired results, Shari raises some good points.

The Search Engine Land blog doesn’t use nofollow on links, but the “information architecture” is sculpted with a very flat profile. SEL is an information resource, and all pages are given almost equal emphasis.
That may not be true of a niche website, e-commerce site, etc – this is something that has to be determined on a case by case basis.

If you are looking at WordPress SEO in a competitive niche, for specific keywords, having a specialist toolset available is an advantage.
That page is blocked by robots.txt, but still ranks highly for reasonably competitive terms based upon anchor text within plenty of editorial links, and internal linking structure, domain authority etc.

Pages blocked by Robots.txt still accumulate Google Juice.

But you shouldn’t give a baby razor blades to play with, let alone a chain saw.

Less Important Pages Can Be Your Quarterbacks

My sitelinks are currently a total mess, and haven’t been updated since November. I have so many links on my front page that Google has a hard time to determine which pages are most important, and some internal pages have attracted a fair number of external links.

On many sites, a contact form, privacy policy, advertising page etc might be important to appear on your sitelinks, but less important in standard search results.

Simple Site Structure

Here we have a simple site structure, with 14 landing pages linked to from the front page. Of these pages, we have determined that 6 are unimportant, and 8 we would ideally like to appear in sitelinks.

The following are just a few examples of how we could arrange the linking structure.

I should point out the following:-

• It is much more complex than these simple diagrams because I haven’t included any 3rd tier (or deeper) pages
• I haven’t included any home links or links from a 3rd 4th etc tier to higher tiers
• Iterative calculations need to be thought about
• There are no leaks

Keep Them Out Of The Index

In this example the pages are so unimportant we want to keep them out of the index, and prevent them soaking up any Google Juice.

We nofollow links to them, and use meta noindex follow on the pages – this keeps them out of the index even if someone else links to them, but allows juice from those links to flow to other pages.
In this situation we should also ensure that there are no external links on the page using plugins such as my nofollow those dupes.

Not So Important Pages

Here we are thinking about usability – we still want those unimportant pages appearing in a site search or a more specific long tail search, but they are not key search terms.
Maybe some of these pages have an effect on site quality.

We nofollow links from the homepage, and maybe from the sidebar or footer throughout the site, but have a live link from the HTML sitemap.

When You Have Multiple Levels Of Importance

In this example we have 3 tiers of importance

• Pages we don’t want in the index or receiving any juice
• Pages that are important for navigation, but should receive less juice
• Primary pillar content aimed at competitive keywords

Our least important pages are still linked heavily, but have no juice being passed to them due to nofollow, and have noindex follow to keep them out of the index, but passing juice if they happen to receive a link.

Our low priority pages are gaining links from the HTML sitemap

Our most important pages receive juice from the home page, and possibly site-wide links.

Nofollow Is Not Required

Nofollow is not a requirement to enhance the flow of Google juice around a site, but it certainly helps.

In this particular case, we have some less important pages that are receiving a lot of jucie, maybe with site-wide links, not just from the home page.

However those pages are not as important as other pages on the site, and would not be our preference to appear as sitelinks.

We allow our unimportant pages to receive the blessing of a front page appearance, but the only links from those unimportant pages are to our most important pages. Juice flows straight through like a 100% efficient conduit.

If we only link to those unimportant pages from the front page, the total amount of juice they receive will be greatly reduced.

No Robots.txt

In these examples I didn’t use robots.txt once.

Robots.txt can be used strategically and in many cases is easier to implement than selective nofollow on links, or noindex follow on pages, but that doesn’t make using it “best practice”.

So Which Method is Best?

None of them, all of them (I just know I will get that question)

SEO is art, you can teach someone to hold a paint brush and all about perspective, but a true masterpiece requires creative talent and a lot of practice.

With my SEO articles I try to go a little further than just showing you how to hold a fishing rod or paint brush

It is quite likely that you have been developing other articles on similar topics for months, receiving very little online attention, and even more worrying, if you create follow-on articles providing important updates, they are less likely to be seen.

The majority of traffic will by default enter your site (the landing page) on the page that received the most links, and this traffic might continue for days, weeks, months and even years.

Ways to highlight other important information:-

• Create a new post to inform your subscribers

  This has a tendency of alienating at least some of your readers, especially those who were not totally convinced by your “blog storm” article. It is quite possible that further articles will be looked on as “milking it”, trying to take advantage of a situation.
  Whilst this might be partially true, the process of providing updated information when/if you are the centre of attention is vital. This is how CNN catapulted into the mainstream, being on the scene of major news stories and providing “up to the minute” news updates.

• Related posts

  Useful for the few people who go to the trouble of clicking them though if they are generated automatically, they can be a little hard to control.
  The problem is that very few people tend to use them, and they generally appear after someone has read the “blog storm” article. Initial reaction will be to the first article they read, and not to any updates, unless you can force them to read updates.

• Update the article with links to newer information

  This is quite a time intensive operation because over the period of a few days you might have to make multiple updates to multiple articles, and when the blogstorm has died down, you might need to optimize the links even further.

  • If all you do is create updates to a single post, whilst new visitors receive a relatively clear picture, your subscribers might only read the original article.
  • It is much easier in the flow of content creation to refer back to previous articles than to update previous articles with links to newer information.
  • If updates are drawn out over weeks or months, it can get very messy

The Simple Solution

One simple solution is to think of any news item as a series of posts, and to use a plugin designed to help you create a series of articles around a particular theme.

The In Series Plugin

The plugin is quite well documented, and will allow you to modify the order in which posts in a series are presented, and you can style the content such that it stands out.

The Advanced Solution

The ideal situation in many cases is to create a specific landing page for a series of articles, that can then be optimized for specific terms, and used to channel both humans and search engines towards the most important articles you want them to see.

This is actually fairly easy to achieve in a number of ways, and most of the skills are similar to the various ways you can perform siloing I described in my WordPress SEO Masterclass.

Here are the basic tasks that need to be undertaken:-

• How to create an optimized landing page

  There are a number of ways to create an optimized landing page. The ideal method will really depend on your existing site structure and the ways you currently highlight content.
  An additional concern is certainly your technical ability. It is much easier to create a round-up post or a page with related links than to create landing pages using more automated methods and get the page looking right.

  • Using a dedicated category with optimized template such as category-6.php in WordPress
  • Creating a dedicated page with manually selected links
  • Using a siloing plugin which presents posts from a particular category on a single page
  • Writing an update post with links to each of the previous articles

• Planning Content

  Work out which articles to link to from a landing page, keyword strategy, and linking structure both to the existing content on the topic, and to other pages you want to get a lot of link juice and attention.

• Planning Redirects

  Not all of this can be automated unfortunately. If you have made specific references to any of the articles that you are about to create redirects for, you need to make a note of them, because these might need to be adjusted so that they contain updated URLs.
  It is hard to do this with incoming links from external sources, and not always desired, but I think that internally where you might often have referenced 4 different articles from within an update page, it is best that those links remain pointing to the specific articles referenced, thus will need to be hand edited.

  Create a table of original URLs, and the updated URL which will soon house that article.

• Create Updated .htaccess

  Create… don’t upload yet

  Here is an example .htaccess entry

  <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  redirect 301 /2007/01/day-job-killer-review.html http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/day-job-killer-review.html
  </IfModule>
  

  In that particular example I was quite lazy and brought a review quickly to my front page by changing the publish date, but I also added a redirect because Google had indexed the old URL.

  I would suggest that these changes should be made right at the end of your .htaccess file.

  It is possible to manage 301 redirects with plugins, and WordPress 2.3+ is also meant to handle some things automatically, but I haven’t experimented with that yet and I don’t like being locked into using particular plugins for my site to function.

• Create Landing Page

  Depending on the method you will be using this may or may not include updated URLs automatically. If you are crafting the links by hand, you may need to refer to your previously prepared table of changes.
  Until the redirects take place, the new landing page will get very little attention from Search Engines or visitors, and whilst it is not ideal to have currently broken links on a page, it is probably better to have a few links that are broken than have lots of visitors get redirected to a page that doesn’t exist.

• Upload .htaccess or Modify Existing URLs

  This stage speed is of the essence, as it is a bit like a chicken and the egg scenario. If you are working with a large site you might need to work out some way to automate this process.

  If you upload the .htaccess first, then visitors will arrive at your landing page, and either click on links that return a 404 page not found error, or in the case of using categories or silo plugins, they will click on links that redirect to where they currently are on the landing page.
  However this is probably better than changing URLs before the .htaccess is in place.

  Once you have uploaded the .htaccess, it is time to modify existing URLs to those you have planned to use.

  I would suggest that “time is of the essence” at this stage, it is not something you can undertake at the end of a working day, though “more haste, less speed” should also be taken into consideration.

  Even with extensive planning, it is fairly easy to mess something up in your linking structure and 301 redirects.

This isn’t an article for SEO beginners, I leave those for the “experts” to write.

Your mileage may vary – I have written this article mainly as part of my own planning stage to make similar changes on this blog.
I have a number of topics that could benefit from using this method, including WordPress SEO, PageRank, Dofollow, Technorati, and even my “about page” which could take advantage of many of the blogging memes.

How much benefit you might gain from this may be marginal from an SEO point of view, or could make a substantial difference.

Fortunately the primary reason for doing this in many cases is to improve the browsing experience for users, so that they arrive at a landing page that provides them with a current overview of a topic, with possibly additional background articles that you feel are important.

There is a lot more to linking structure on a website or blog than just sticking nofollow on a few links to pages of less importance, or installing a wonder “do everything” SEO plugin.

Power Tip – once you get comfortable with this, you can actually plan your content with this strategy in mind, choosing your page titles and URLs carefully to maximise the benefit of redirects in the future.

In many ways this technique is the opposite to 3rd level push, though the concepts are not mutually exclusive, as whilst you are diverting link juice from a 3rd level document to one on the second tier, that juice then flows evenly (if you want) to your 3rd level.

Optimize your site for users not search engines ;) [cough]

Is being included among Top Commenters really a benefit?
Does Top Commenters give more benefit to blog owners than the harm it can cause if you are not careful?

Traffic

Andy Beal introduced Top Commenters to his blog on 19th February, and since that time I have been among his top commenters most of the time. I didn’t change my commenting habits, and even argued against including it.

In almost 1 month those links, plus the links from my comments have driven a total of 29 visitors to my site – Google Analytics only picked up 23 of them, so I am sticking with the MBL numbers.
Without exception, the clicks seem to have been on posts where I have made a comment, thus nothing to do with appearing across the whole of Andy’s site on the sidebar.

This might question the value of text link ads for traffic on blogs, I suppose it depends on how much a visitor is worth to you.

SEO

Site wide might be looked on as something desirable from a high ranking blog, but the value is limited.

• It is in the sidebar, thus the value is diminished by the major search engines
• The link isn’t permanent – what effect does a link that appears and then disappears at the start of a new month have
• The link might not be relevant
• The link in many cases points to the root domain rather than laser targeted LSI Related Content.

This to a lesser extent questions the value of paid text links for SEO, but note with paid text links you choose the anchor text, and can choose to advertise for more than 1 month

Effect on The Hosting Blog

On a well designed blog, the negative effect of providing Top Commenters can be mitigated, but the majority of sites where I have seen this plugin implemented will experience a detrimental effect on their internal Google juice.

The problems associated with the Top Commenters Plugin are similar to those that can affect blogs which have long blogrolls.

• Theme design – the theme uses the same template file for for the front page and single pages, and thus plugin output appears across the whole site, including duplicate content pages. Good themes use single.php for individual posts, and also include archive.php and other template files for navigation and search pages
• Widgets – The WordPress Widget plugin is convenient – unfortunately every theme I have seen applies Widgets to every sidebar across a site, and thus the links will again appear everywhere, even if a single.php template exists.

Pouring Liquids

Lets take a situation that you have 10 glass milk bottles in a line, and one of them is filled up with milk.

Your challenge is to consecutively pour the contents of a bottle into its neighbour until you reach the end of the line. You have to do this as quickly as possible.

The smart thing to do would be to use a large funnel, that prevents milk escaping and only allows it to flow in the direction you intend. Without the funnel, lets say you lose 10% of your milk in each transfer, you would only have 39% of your milk in the last bottle.

WordPress Duplicate Content

With WordPress you have multiple navigation and archive pages that contain duplicate content, and on a poorly designed blog theme, would also include blogroll links and Top Commenters links.

• Date Based Archives
• Categories
• Sequential Pages – page1, page2
• Tag Pages

There are plugins available that add noindex nofollow to the meta tags on these duplicate content pages, and if you wanted to have total control, it is possible to ensure that the only links to your content come from your sitemap – in doing so you could potentially reduce other important factors in search engine calculations such as relevance.

I have seen blogs with as much as 90% external links on all their duplicate content pages.

Alternatively with no blogroll, and no Top Commenters plugin, you can reduce the number of external links on duplicate content pages to as little as 5%, even if you are generous with your external links within the content.

Dofollow – Remove Nofollow From Comments

This is my preferred alternative and I use it on all my WordPress blogs that have comments enabled.

• All comments provide permanent links, and you can make that link more relevant by using a deep link to related content on one of your own sites
• All trackbacks provide a followable permanent link between related content
• Comments only appear on the single pages that are gaining from other sites. They don’t appear on most duplicate pages.
• Real comments with related content surround your backlinks giving them enhanced value
• By cultivating and preserving Google Juice, it flows to where it matters, subsequently comment links on those pages are more valuable.

Here is a list of available dofollow plugins, and some alternatives that can be used for other google juice flow control.

Effects on Other Services

Site wide links do have an effect on other services such as Technorati and some meme trackers as I have recently discussed. This can be beneficial for the number of links, but remember that Technorati ranking is based on number of unique sites rather than the number of links.

More Comments

Maybe it influences some, but rewarding 5 or 10 people, when 100s of people take part in your blog isn’t the fairest system in the world. In addition the people who often try to be the top commenter for the link value often should be spending more time on their own blogs than commenting on yours.
I am all for encouraging discussion, but not at the detriment to someone elses real interests. Helping people sometimes isn’t encouraging them to spend hours per day commenting on your blog just to get a temporary site wide link that is of little short term, or long term value.

Google Juice has already become a very well known term. It relates to how one website page links to another, thus giving it a vote of confidence, which a search engine such as Google subsequently uses to determine the relevance of the page that is linked to. This is how Google Pagerank is determined, PR10 being the ultimate goal. It should be noted that pagerank is something that is determined on an ongoing basis. This new blog of mine is still PR0, but probably already has enough links both internally and externally to be looked on as PR4 or PR5.

Here are my new definitions

Google Feast: A website full of lots of content, hopefully (intelligently) interlinked between LSI relevant content. The content should ideally be provided by “authorities” in the subject to give it enhanced relevance.

Google Banquet: A Google Banquet is a combination of Google Juice and Google Feast

I am looking to create lots of Google Banquets. I will expand the definition as I release more details of my major projects.
This is a very white-hat strategy. It is not gaming the search engines, it is providing the search engines with exactly what they are looking for… and then some!

Amazon.com is only a PR9, with 2,680,000 links reported to their front page.

Cnn.com is also PR9, but has 158,000 links reported to their front page

Based upon my new definitions, CNN is a Google Banquet, Amazon.com is not.