Is this a good or bad thing?

What does nofollow mean anyways?

Glad you asked.

You should care because a lot of folks were trying to game the Google ranking system by link dropping their space junk onto Google using social bookmarking…of which Digg, is the king.

What’s social bookmarking?  Also glad you asked.  Social bookmarking are sites where people come together and share awesome links with eachother and they’re VERY popular.  …and Google at some point in the game decided that a few of them were interesting enough to provide a TON of PageRank to which made them big targets for SEOs & general link spammers. You could publish an article, a blog post, a video or whatever and go drop a link at Digg or one of the other social bookmarking sites and Google would give some weight and notice to that link placement.

Now that this game has been played out pretty heavily and abused to death, Digg decided to put the smack down of a ‘nofollow’ tag on external links to websites that they couldn’t verify as trustworthy or had some level of true ‘user popularity.’

See their post on it today here: http://blog.digg.com/?p=864

Anyways, this nofollow tag on links simply means that they’re going to tell Google to not worry with following those links unless they’re trustworthy.

Is this good or bad?

Bottom line it’s a GREAT thing for both SEOs, internet marketers AND users.  There won’t be such a rash of abuse coming from Diggs and Google’s bot won’t be instructed to follow any spamtastic links.

Ok to wrap up, what does nofollow mean anyways?  Years ago Google decided to allow webmasters to apply this little sniplet of code to their links

<a href=”http://somedomain.com/link-yada-yada/” rel=”nofollow”>text or image link</a>

This would allow the site owner or webmaster to tell Google to not be concerned with crawling that link.  This was useful so that site owners could post links but not waste quality outbound links on trivial stuff…and dilute their website’s Page Rank strength.

Hope that geek speak makes sense.

Anyways, Cheers to Digg for getting on board with helping to fight spam and also to apparently be applying some assistance to Google in determining what might be a quality outbound link and what isn’t.  In this statement it seemed clear it’d make it easy for Google to determine which links Digg thought might be worthy of crawling:

“while still flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content. We’ve added rel=”nofollow” to any external link that we’re not sure we can vouch for. This includes all external links from comments, user profiles and story pages below a certain threshold of popularity.”

Take care and remember, focus on building quality content for users.  Link building schemes are just that…schemes.  Use them only when you are certain that your conent being published is truly link-drop-worthy and of benefit to your audience.

Related posts:

1. Directory Submission, Backlinks and Space Junk…Oh My!

PLEASE… DO NOT CREATE SPACE JUNK

“What are you talking about?” is probably what you’re thinking right about now.

Let me explain.  Just recently I was doing some work for a client who wanted to promote his legal practice’s web site and while evaluating his competitor’s backlinks and anchor text it was discovered that there may be some directories he should try to be included in.

Well, not quite.

After reviewing one of these wonderful “SEO friendly” directories it was very evident that it was not so friendly and not such a good idea to get him listed there.  Why is that?  Let me back up a little here.

First off, building links for the sake of building links is frowned upon by Google for good reason.  They don’t want people gaming the system which makes total sense from both a user and marketing perspective.  If everyone could rank well quickly by littering the interwebs with space junk it’d not be fun or useful for anyone.  That being said if you have a quality site and want to get noticed, at least ’some’ attention should be placed on getting the word out about your web site, which includes getting links to your site…right?  No plants grow without seeds and water.

OK, now back to the point of the story.  If you are publishing high quality content, links will be built naturally over time by people passing around your information, but to get this done you need to ’seed and water’ the site a little bit.

So, when reviewing strategies to acquire those initial quality backlinks make sure you don’t accidentally list your site in a space-junk directory.

When I first viewed this one directory for my client, the top of the page was covered in pretty relevant material (other sites and good links)…  However after crawling deeper onto that page these were noticed:

The next thing noticed was that both the category listing and the main root of the site had this PageRank assigned to it:

So not only did this directory decide to litter it’s ‘legal company’ directory page with escort links and other nonsense, apparently Google noticed this and rewarded them accordingly with that lovely PageRank.

This made the decision to skip listing here very easy.

So, where are the quality directories to get listed on you ask?

Stick with the known good boys on the block:  dir.yahoo.com, dmoz.org, botw.org, business.com and maybe joeant.com

Why are these more important or considered trusted?  Simple.  Google has likely deemed these directories as trustworthy as not only is there a fee (except for dmoz) but also human review and editorial oversight as to who gets listed.  Just because you pay for a listing/review does not necessarily mean you’ll be accepted to the directory.  So then only quality sites ’should’ be listed there.  Makes sense doesn’t it?

Ok, now you know what’s up with quality backlinks, bad neighborhoods and why it’s not a good idea to try and spread space junk around.

Go Fight Win…and be good. :)

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Here’s some more great stuff to read on the topic of link building:

10 Link Building & Tracking Tools for SEO – Online Marketing Blog
Link building for seo » SEO Articles Now
Best SEO Blog » Blog Archive » Why link building may not wor..

Related posts:

1. Digg to Apply Nofollow to External Links