In previous Daily Gold Nuggets, we've mentioned methods to get links from other businesses in your town or in neighboring towns. Building links to your site is very important and there is a huge variety of ways you can do so.
The important part to link building is making sure that the link to your website is not what we call a "nofollowed" link. A few years ago, the search engines came up with this "rel=nofollow" feature in order to prevent the huge comment spam that was building up on blog posts.
Many people were intentionally commenting on blog posts and including the link back to their website as a method of link building. The result was a huge amount of link spam and improper search results pages. The nofollow feature nullified and disqualified this type of spam and all those links, which quickly returned all search engines to normal functionality.
In 2010, we've noticed that almost all of the membership websites, blogs, news sites and WordPress powered sites we lurk around it have the nofollow feature turn on. This includes Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, YouTube, Match.com and any other membership or blog site you can think of. Every comment, Tweet, Facebook link share and link from a profile is nofollowed, and therefore disqualified in the process of building links to your website.
With all this disqualification happening, it makes you wonder how you are supposed to get any links at all to your site.
In Google's opinion, the answer is simple: You need to have something on your website that will entice a blogger to write about you. Usually a blogger will include a link to your website within the body of their post, and those links do not have the nofollow block on them.
That might seem like a simple opinion, but in reality it's almost a strangle hold around your website's neck. We think it's pretty tough for a jewelry website to include information that will motivate bloggers to link to you. There are only so many ways you can post educational information on your website about wearing pearls with a black dress. Certainly that's not a topic a blogger would want to cover anyway.
However, there is one saving grace. In October 2010, Google launched a new version of their Webmaster Tools. One of the usual features inside Webmaster Tools is a report of all the websites linking to yours, and it only shows links that count.
However, after October 8, 2010, the number of links we found in that report shot up by thousands, and in one case, even more than 100,000 inbound links. Google was reporting on links from Facebook and Twitter, even though they have a nofollow attribute!
Officially as of December 18, 2010 Google publically announced that they will, in fact, use links from Facebook and Twitter to help your ranking.
SPAM ALERT: Just because Google says they are counting Facebook and Twitter today does not mean they will count them for everyone. So go ahead and share your website on any of your publicly open Facebook accounts, but don't overdo it.
We will continue our basic SEO Nuggets tomorrow. Until then Google TFYQA and have a great day.
