Search Engine Optimization Tip
Search Engine Optimization Tip
DO NOT USE NOFOLLOW!
Google has announced through Matt Cutts (Google employee) that they no longer treat nofollow as it was intended!
Nofollow
was originally adopted to amongst other things help prevent comment
link spamming of blogs, forums, guestbooks etc... without harming the
pages the spammed (nofollow) links are on.
It was a very good SEO
idea by the major search engines, amongst others Google, Yahoo and Bing
used nofollow in their search engine algorithms.
For webmasters
and SEO consultants this opened up a new way to link to pages, like
affiliate product pages that would not waste PR/link benefit. Previously
a webmaster not wanting to send link benefit through a link would use
javascript and other methods for 'hiding' the links from search engine
bots.
I like many other webmasters have used nofollow extensively
on blogs (WordPress is my choice of CMS) to prevent comment link
spamming on pages with comments enabled, many webmasters also use
nofollow links to link to affiliate sites where you don't want to waste
link benefit on an affiliate product page.
This made a lot of
sense for both webmasters and Google et al, we got an easy way to tell
Google a link shouldn't pass link benefit and Google wouldn't give
ranking benefit to pages/sites webmasters didn't want to rank well: I
promote various Clickbank products for money, when I link to one I'm not
saying this page is great, I'm saying I want someone to buy that
product through my link. If link benefit is passed that page could rank
better than my page! If I linked to the BNP (British National Party) to
comment on how racist they are, I don't want Google to treat that link
as a positive vote for their site, nofollow was perfect for negative
reviews on sites.
As mentioned above Google no longer honors the
intended use of nofollow, rather than protecting the PR/link benefit of
nofollow links, it deletes it!!!
Yes deletes our hard earned PR/link benefit!!
What
this means is if you have a site with a lot of nofollow links, I for
example have popular WordPress blogs with pages with hundreds of
comments. WordPress by default adds nofollow to commenter's links, so if
you have a page with 100 comments and half the commenter's added an
author ink (50 links) now Google is treating that page as though the 50
nofollow links are normal links except it doesn't pass the PR/link
benefit to the linked to page, it destroys it instead. So if you have a
page with 50 nofollow links and 50 normal links that means half the link
benefit that should have gone to the 50 normal links is deleted in
effect halving the SEO benefit that would (should) have passed via the
normal links!
I have pages with up to 700 comments, I could be
throwing away well over half my PR/link benefit. For this reason I've
been fading out use of nofollow on my sites.
One option is using
form button links with method post as search engines do not treat these
as links (they are used to submit search forms etc...). Example below
going to one of my sites:
With a little CSS you can make a form button like this look almost like a text links, take a look at the joke site URL above Jokes and on the menu there's a Login link that's a form button, also all commenter's links are now created using form buttons: I had the ability to post a author URL disabled until a few days ago so, there's only a handful of actual author comment links (registered users basically).
I sell about a dozen AdSense/SEO WordPress themes and when I've got the code completely nailed down will incorporate this into my themes.
Sucks that Google would do this to webmasters, nofollow was working fine, now we have to go back to javascript and tricks like the one above!
