Two questions about nofollow

Let’s talk a little bit about nofollow. Here are a few questions regarding this: Vince Samios from UK asks “Do you feel the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms?”

Let me inter-check before I finish the question, even though SEO’s may feel like nofollow is everywhere on the web, if you look at the percentage of links that have nofollow, it’s actually a pretty minuscule percentage. So nofollows aren’t that common on the web compared to how the perception of them might be.

(Continues with the question) “Examples such as Wikipedia, where all external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms?”

And Jonaths from Brighton, UK asks “Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?”

We are not trusting or taking into account the links from Wikipedia because they are nofollows. So don’t bother to spamming Wikipedia, it’s not going to make any difference in search engine rankings if you get a link because, that will be nofollow. If you have a great resource and people find it via Wikipedia and it’s just fantastic and people link to that because of that, or you getting traffic from a link in terms of direct surfers or visitors, then that might benefit your site. But it’s not going to get any search engine ranking boost just because Wikipedia links to you with those nofollow links. Now let me take a one slight detour and mention that, if a particular site does have trust in the person who is making the link then there is plenty of good reasons to make that link flow page rank and take the nofollow off. For example, Wikipedia has experimented with all kinds of different ways to improve their process, may be anonymous said that it has to be approved before they go live. So you could certainly imagine a scenario which Wikipedia editor, who is very trusted, who had made a ton of edits without them ever being reverted there are other editors they have asked for, however they want to define trust those links might for example take the nofollow off. So a very simple thing when you are being under attack from a spam register at that nofollow tag and then it doesn’t benefit spammers anymore. But if you run a blog or forum or Wikipedia or whatever and you can come up with a good metric to say, ok these are the links that we do trust that we do think that are editorially given and are valuable for users then there is plenty of good reasons to go ahead and say make those links flow page ranks. But in general nofollow links are relatively small percentage of the web and it does prevent lot of sites from getting spammed. We don’t use those links from Wikipedia currently, but if Wikipedia want it to put them on newly asked policies and place, I would definitely support that.

Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?

Mharris from NY asks, “Does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects? Will there be a penalty for sites that do this as their sole way of link building?”

Typically, anchor text does flow through 301 redirects, but don’t promise that, that will always happen. So the question is does it carry through all, not necessarily, we deserve the right to score not only links and how we determine the weights in trust of the links and also the trust that we have for redirects. I can tell you that if your sole method of link building is trying to get 301 redirects that’s going to be pretty conspicuous, because we log all the redirects we see, just like we log all the links that we see. And so if all of your incoming anchor texts is through 301 redirects, that’s going to appear pretty strange. Especially because, whenever we go looking for our tools that would be a pretty abnormal thing to do, so my advice is make a great site that attracts links naturally because it’s a fantastic resource and don’t worry about trying to get some page ranks or some anchor texts in some way that search engines might not be able to catch or other people may not be able to follow. Because if you get that organic long term sort of links, the links that are given freely because you have a great resource those are the links that typically last the best and have the most impact.

Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?

First question is, Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on “brands” in search engine rankings? If the answer is “Yes” – what is Google’s definition of a brand? Inspired by Aaron’s Wall’s post: http://www.seobook.com/google-branding. That comes from Monica, Madison, WI.

So I’ll try to give a pretty complete answer to this. I was planning on talking about a little bit more at pub-con in Austin in just a couple of weeks. But inside of Google at least within the search ranking team, we don’t really think about brands. We think about words like trust, authority, reputation, page rank, high quality and so the Google philosophy on search results has been the same pretty much for ever. It’s that if somebody comes to Google and types an “x”, we want to return high quality information about ‘x’. And sometimes that’s a brand search; sometimes that’s an information search; sometimes that’s navigational; sometimes it’s transactional, so there are all sorts of different information needs that people have. First off, Yes, Google has made a change in our rankings; it’s one of over 300 or 400 changes that we make every year. So I wouldn’t call this an update, I would call it just a simple change. If we have to refer to it, one of the people did a lot of work on it, his name was Venz and this particular change we talk about is Venz’s change within the Google places. So I wouldn’t really call it an update, but I would say that, there has been at least a change in how we do some rankings. It doesn’t affect a vast majority of queries it’s more likely and most people haven’t even noticed it; I mean Aaron talked about it and I think even before that people at webmaster were talking about it. But it affects relatively a small number of queries, it’s not like it affects a ton of long queries or anything like that. I don’t think of it as putting more weight on brands, we don’t really think about “brands” in search quality that much. For example, if you type eclipse, if Google was really focused on brands we might return Mitsubishi eclipse you know number one or something like that. And if you actually go to Google and type in eclipse, we’ve got eclipse.org because it’s a development environment, we’ve got Nasa’s eclipse website and there are some commercial results, for example; Eclipse is the name of the book in the Twilight series, so we’ve got a page from amazon. But it’s not like we always try to return brands, we try to return whatever we think the best results are for users. So the net update of this change is pretty simple, we try to return high quality results, we think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, page rank and so what you should be doing doesn’t change. Try to make a great site, try to make a site that is so fantastic that you sort of become known as an authority in your niche. It doesn’t have to be a big niche, it doesn’t have to be a huge well-known keyword, it can be a smaller niche and if you are still the expert and that’s the sort of thing that people want to link to or talk about, the sort of things that people really enjoy and those are the sort of sites the experts that we want to bring back.

How is Google helping Google Analytics users with site speed?

Today’s webmaster video question comes from Polyana, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Polyana asks, ‘ When analyzing rankings for highly competitive keywords in our industry, we have found sites not as optimized as ours ( on-page), and that have few links & little content are still ahead of us. What gives? Why are “unoptimized” sites ranking so well?”

Well, the thing that I want to avoid is the impression that it’s only the optimization that would make you rank. In others, there are lots of different factors that would make you rank well, but fundamentally, we try to look at on-page contents as well as off-domain links and it’s not the case that just because somebody has done optimization, it is automatically better than the site that hasn’t done optimization. There are lots of sites from schools and students and people that hand-write their html and they might not necessarily get every single thing optimized, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a good resource. So, another thing is we typically do not show all of the back links for a site to your competitors. If you log into Google webmaster tools then we give you a very exhaustive list. But even if you go into yahoo link explorer or anywhere else, you are going to get only a subset or different sampling of the links that point to a particular competitor’s site. The reason we do that is link: originally; we did not have the storage space to return all the back links and then over time that sort of became a tradition. So there might very well be links from very high rate page ranks or very reputable sites pointing to that particular other page that’s allowing it to rank. So, you know it’s always tough whenever you are talking about it in terms of other people in your industry; we always want to look at it and say, that’s not good as a page or not as good a site as my site. But bear in mind that you can absolutely have links that you might not know about as far as two competing sites or to your own sites that your competitors might not know about, and then we try not to put so much emphasis that you have to do SEO because we want sites to be able to rank well on the basis of mirror, if they are good they should show up in search results, that’s our basic philosophy.

Interesting Quote Request

We are currently using RomanCart, which quite frankly is an fairly great shopping cart. But like all rented/leased carts, we find limitations when we need something that they do not have on their schedule to add. Sometimes it is (at least to us) fairly obvious that it is badly needed and should be added. For example, You cannot override the ground shipping and make it free. Now before you get excited and start making obvious assumptions, we can make it free by entering zero lbs and that works, but if a customer wants to select 2 or 3-day, they cannot.

We are looking for a new “very secure” shopping cart and have looked at several free and paid. OSCommerce (which is actually fairly good once we made some changes like 1 page checkout, etc. In addition to the basic stuff, we would also like to see the following. XCart which does not integrate with Google and PayPal. PdAdmin Pro (which we bought) but does not integrate with Google Checkout or PayPal. We know we can add this functionality ourselves, but would rather find a cart with it, so we can focus on our business.

Source code is almost a must. We are tired of having our hands tied by some developer who writes for themselves. We had one jerk actually make a change without any notice that prevented customers from using the cart for 5 freaking days.

Integrations with Google Checkout and PayPal. i.e.. Not just a link to them. We want communication between them and the cart, so that the shopping cart has a complete copy of the order just like the regular orders. i.e.. We want our metrics all in one place. RomanCart does this. If we could purchase the source for RomanCart, we would be very happy. If I could just get them to make changes once in a while I would be happy with them. We also tested Ecwid which had some impressive Ajax code, but again failed in the Google & PayPal integration.

Live Order tracking so customers can track where their order is. Funny, but most carts fail on this obviously needed functionality. EasyCart handle this very well.

Work with a previous existing website. i.e.. We call the cart with a product ID, instead of the cart building the website.

A really valuable feature would be PCI compliance. For example, delete all credit card details after products ship.

Most carts ship all products at once, but RomanCart allows you to ship partial orders. Very nice feature. Too bad you cannot get the source.

Note: It appears that a cart in .PHP or .ASP are better then Java, but I would think, that the way we use ours now would make a C# or C or C++ more secure. Maybe you can shed some light on this, offer us a solution, or point us in a possible direction to investigate.

Also, do you have a demo of the control panel?  The part for updating statuses and adding the tracking numbers..

Affected by PAID links? We can help you

Affected By Paid Links

Google has long time warned not to get paid links for the purpose of increasing PageRank and rankings. But so many companies kept buying links. For a long time people got away with paid links. Some got caught in Google paid link penalty some got away without any issues.

Recently ( September 2010 ) Google’s engineers removed the plug on paid links. We have seen and experienced 1000s of sites loosing rankings within a span of 2 weeks.

Almost all the sites were buying links one way or the other. We started getting leads where people have bought links and were affected by Google’s recent buying links penalty.

We at Search Engine Genie have always stayed away from paid links to boost PageRank. We have denied lot of offers from link brokers to buy links from them for our clients. In our company we don’t encourage buying links. There are areas where we tend to go a bit aggressive due to the competition but we always stayed away from buying links.

Till today we never bought a single link to our client. Most of the links are either got naturally or traded or got from some other purpose other than link buying.

If you recently got affected by paid link penalty we are ready to help you. We can get your site recovered and ranked without any paid links. We have done this before and doing it now for our clients. Google kept stressing buying links for the purpose of increasing ranking and PageRank is a big no-no. Feel free to fill up the contact form on this page or send us an email to this email ID (support@searchenginegenie.com). We will get back to you with a quote to recover your website and get it back in ranking. Understand that Google is not the only search engine that is against paid links even yahoo and bing have strict polices.

If you have trouble with any search engine contact us and we can help you.

Google’s miserable failure on Paid links

Google recently penalized lot of websites that were buying links. In this process some sites were penalized even though they don’t buy links. Google’s new algorithm that detects paid links is a miserable failure according to me. So many sites got affected and even 2 or 3 our sites got affected. We never bought links for our client sites but 2 sites were affected because it looks like the backlinks were bought. The pattern of our links are no-where the same as the paid links that others get for their sites but still we lost 5 or 10 places for some important keywords. I can understand an automated algorithm cannot be 100% accurate in detecting paid links but they should also be careful before pulling the plug. I feel more manual review should happen so that the sites affected are really buying links and not just because their backlink pattern might look similar to a site that buys links for top ranking. The worse thing here is so many sites that are buying links got away with it and the sites that never bought links got caught. I hope Google is more careful with their buying links algorithm in future.

Are embedded links in widgets ethical?

Google and other search engines have always stressed for people to get only natural links. The whole link based algorithm depends a lot on natural links. Scientists wrote link based algorithm because links are natural and more reliable. Talking about widget embedded links this has been in debate for a long time. Search engines always have mixed opinion on this.

Embedding links in widgets has been in existing from the day widgets were introduced. Statcounter.com a world famous tracking company which provides free tracking were PR 10 because of the links embedded in their counter. Seeing this people started this natural usage of links in a commercial way. People started approaching commercial counter companies to embed their links when free counters are distributed in exchange for a payment. Lots of companies got temporary benefit from it but the search engines immediately woke up to the occasion. An SEO company which did this as part of their link building strategy was completed banned from Google’s search engine. Also Google started implementing link based penalties like the -60 penalty for sites that use widgets to embed links. Even we were affected a bit but later recovered. So is this ethical? . In my opinion I feel the user should know that the link is embedded into the widget code as long as they know it its fine. But if the links are embedded without the user’s knowledge then it’s wrong. I feel search engines too have similar view. People should have the ability to embed the link or remove it or make it no-follow. If they can do it I am confident the search engines will accept it whole heartedly.

TAGS: Link Building, SEO

SEO Blog Back Again

I have to personally take the blame for not updating my blog regularly. I am learning to get rid of this laziness in me. Ill make sure from now on ill keep you entertained with my posts. Also blogger ftp being discontinued affected our blogs but that was not till end if May. I don’t have an explanation for not posting before may. My last posting was in Feb, that is 4 months before blogger discontinued allowing FTP publishing. Now I am back to some serious blogging I will be giving you latest updates in SEO industry and also will continue to share my experiences that I have gained over the years.

TAGS: SEO Blog Back Again

Google’s blind eye towards paid links:

Recently we are seeing more and more websites buying links casually to get their rankings boosted. Google who is opposing paid links openly are nowadays showing a blind eye towards mass link buying. We are a SEO company but we always stay away from buying links or recommend clients not to buy links. Its because we know that buying links are the biggest plague to hurt the search engines but the search engines seem to not realize it.

Yahoo is the only search engine which is serious about link buyers. Google seem to be never interested. They keep saying they want to fight it algorithmically and in this process they ban some innocent sites. Almost a year back our ranking got devalued because Google thought our widget links are paid links and devalued our rankings (http://www.searchenginegenie.com/widget/seo_statistics_widget.php ) .

More and more people resort to link buying these days. Almost all clients who come to us for SEO and have done SEO before have paid links to their site placed by previous SEO companies. So is automated detection working? I see it a big failure people just find innovative ways to hide links from Google’s algorithmic detection and the result it hurts Google.

I expect Google to take more action on buying links since it hurts people like us who don’t buy links. Our clients push us hard to buy links but still we stay away to stay within Google guidelines. If Google continues to show blind eye towards paid links companies like us too with resort to buying links since we don’t have an ethical option to tackle aggressive competition.