Welcome to 2011!
We expect a plethora of SEO experts to post wonderful articles today about how SEO changed over 2010 and what the future will hold for all of us. We're staying away from the predictions and simply following forward with basic SEO discussions.
Although, our discussions are not simply old SEO techniques regurgitated over and over again. We do spend a lot of time making sure what we are saying is still valid. We search through what the SEO experts are saying and we especially look for the guys that have the analytical data to prove what they're saying.
We never believe any SEO expert who makes a claim without evidence to back it up.
Once we find something interesting, we compare it to our own jewelry-specific measurements and determine if the same finding also holds true within the jewelry industry.
Recently, we've been reviewing Google's Webmaster series of videos and were absolutely blown away by one of their 2 minute videos.
Last week, we told you about the nofollow linking attribute and how it is used to combat link spam on blogs and social media sites. The nofollow feature tells the search engine to ignore the link and therefore it prevents PageRank from passing from one web page to another.
Back in 2008, a few pretty smart people figured out that you could use the nofollow feature on your own website to control your page rank, and the fancy term of "PageRank Sculpting" was created to describe that process.
After reviewing several Google videos, we discovered a few Gold Nuggets of our own. The first is that the nofollow attribute not only tells Google to ignore a link, but it also indicates that the linked page "should not be trusted."
That's a huge OMG for us web programmers and developers. A nofollowed link also means "do not trust that web page!"
This is not something we read between the lines on, either. Matt Cutts, a well-known and trusted Google representative, specifically said that nofollowed pages are not trusted because it is assumed they are trying to spam.
So why in the world would we use nofollow on our own websites to sculpt PageRank?
Why would we point links to our own website and say "Hey, Man! Don't trust us!"
Well, the simple answer is we shouldn't but no one ever stood up and asked the question before and Google never publically debunked the practice.
So, to open 2011 with what we think is an Earth-shattering Gold Nugget, we're standing up and saying "Hey, Man! We're totally wrong!"
Yep, apparently SEO experts all over the world are using this nofollow feature on their website completely incorrectly. Google published this video on June 29, 2010 and only 10,068 people have viewed it so far. That's not a lot of views considering that web programmers are a dime a dozen. Since we're still trying to debunk the Meta Keyword myth after 10 years, it might take a few years for this nofollow debunking to get out there too.
So what does this mean to you? Unfortunately, you need to contact your webmaster and find out if nofollow is used in your own navigation and have it removed. You might even have to restructure the link strategy of your navigation. No doubt it's going to require some money to get this fixed, but the result should be eventual higher ranking in the Google SERP.
Since we always say you should think for yourself and question authority, we want to give you the actual Google video to watch for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SAPUx4Beh8
We'll see you tomorrow!
