- 45
- Sphinn It!
Posted By: vangogh 248 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Link Building
6 Comments
6 Comments
Save the date for:
SMX China (Nanjing) - Sept. 23-24
SMX Stockholm - Sept. 23-24: See who's speaking or register now.
SMX East (New York City) - Oct.
6-8: See the agenda or register today and save!
SMX London - Nov. 4-5: Pre-agenda rate now available. Click here.
Comments
hey thanks Vanessa for the t-awesome quote from ask.com on this subject. If only the other search engines would adopt this philosophy we could go on with our lives.
I'd like to know how any search engine is supposed to distinguish quality.
I've taken the extreme step of adding "nofollow" to every outgoing link.. overreacting? Maybe, but I think I have good reason to do so: More thoughts on the Google Slap, no follow and a Slap Back
For example, I have a large "Unix/Linux Consultants List". It's as white-hat as you can get: I don't charge for the listing, and the people who do list there are definitely organically relevant to my site's content (unixy stuff). But there is no way Google is going to see that as anything but a ,ong list of links, and they don't know I'm not charging, and they don't know the people who submitted there aren't looking for link-love - so I have to add "nofollow" - which is very unfair to those people because they legitimately are organic links!
What message are you sending by adding nofollow to every outgoing link? To me that says you don't trust any outgoing link, in which case why link to them. If you consider a good portion of your content untrustworthy how should a search engine see that same content?
I'm not suggesting adding all the nofollows is wrong. Just trying to raise some questions.
Weird - I received a trackback on this but no mention in the piece itself....anyway, moving on, nice recap of what will continue to be a thorny and contentious topic.
Google has become the dog, content providers and webmasters are now the tail. That's quite an achievement really.
Happy New Year!
Excellent review and summary; well worth the read.
So basically, Matt Cutts would prefer us to nofollow all links on any page that has sponsored content.
But let's look at EVERY content management system out there - especially blogs (including their own Blogger). We would have to nofollow our entire sidebar in order to be compliant with his recommendation. The sidebar appears on other pages with no sponsored content, but because the sidebar is the same on the pages with sponsored content, we would be damned if we did, and damned if we didn't.
I'm especially pleased to see Ask taking a stand on the side of users, in direct opposition of Google on this whole paid links scandal. I removed 4 extremely relevant paid links from my site two months ago, yet still have yet to see my PR returned to the level it used to be. I've always been hyper-picky about which advertisers I allowed on my site in the first place, I'm glad that Ask won't penalize me for showing relevant and valuable ads to my readers.