Dear Google
Your recent decision to invoke a manual penalty on the download page for Google Chrome will have lasting ramifications for the whole of online marketing, whether display advertising, affiliate marketing, and other performance marketing such as CPA models, making many such business models unworkable.
Read more on Open Video To Google – Please Reinstate Chrome…
The Twitter retweet code places a link to Twitter on every page you include it, and they didn’t add a nofollow to the link. It is quite possible Google will decide to ignore all these links in the future, especially as it is effectively hidden and not a “vote” for a particular page. The destination of the link doesn’t show similar information to what is in the button.
Read more on 7 Reasons Not To Use The New Tweet Buttons…
Unlike many people in the SEO, Tech or Marketing community, I don’t write posts just for linkbait & traffic, and when I make up my mind about whether I want to continue being involved in a community, that decision is final.
Read more on Twitter Nofollow – My 7 Day Ultimatum…
Twitter deciding to nofollow links 2 years ago really annoyed me.
When they decided to close all loopholes in creating an active link within the bio area, it prevented me linking to my disclosure policy – that annoyed me as well, especially with all the terrible attempts of providing adequate disclosure within paid tweets that are currently being used/proposed.
There was a huge outcry from the SEO community.
Read more on Tweetglide vs Twitter For SEO…
Nice search engine friendly links are a great way to reward valuable members of the community of any blog, but they are certainly not a right, and still find myself deleting 50+ worthless comments every day.
Most disturbing of all though are the SEO consultants and agencies who I have caught commenting on behalf of their clients, or as themselves with a link through to a client’s site. Some of them are totally dumb about it.
I now have a new comments policy in force though most of it is just a clearer interpretation of what has been in place for the last 3+ years.
Changing the way WordPress and other content management systems handle comments for SEO, members areas, aggregated conversations & more.
I am sure some of this post is going to blow people’s brains, though this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Dave Naylor seems to think it is a good idea to nofollow blog comments.
In many ways he is right:-
It takes additional time to manage comments on your blog even when you set up Spam Karma effectively, but that is something you could outsource to compensate, or have managed by a more junior member of staff.
You also leak a little bit of extra juice, how much depends on your site structure, and how many comments you get. Some people prefer to have huge blogrolls of the people who buy them drinks at seminars.
I think the biggest gain is in community
There seems to be a new trend with internet marketers running some kind of mentorship or bonus program.
It runs something like this (though I haven't signed up to one to get exact details)
The backlinks are sometimes the link reserved for the comment author, or sometimes product mentions
If you don't know what you are doing with nofollow, noindex and robots.txt you can royally mess* things up (face to face I would use a stronger term). Even if you do know what you are doing, you can still mess things up.
I can understand why Matt Cutts might want to change what noindex does, it is not just Koreans making occasional mistake, 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
How a Blogroll Can Still Kill Your PageRank
Navigational elements on a blog or any website are an important feature, but you should be careful not to take things to extremes which can hurt the progress of your site, both from a SEO perspective and for website conversion.
Read more on How a Blogroll Can Still Kill Your PageRank…