What Is a Link Scheme? Ask an SEO, Get a Wrong Answer
Everyone knows that Google expressly forbids the use of link schemes that are designed to influence their search results. Technically, they have no objection to any link scheme of any type that does not influence their search results (although, on the gripping hand, they do stress that whatever you do on your Websites should be done for visitors, not for search engines). SEO bloggers love to write serious-toned warnings against the use of link schemes. I have probably written a few myself, somewhere in the past. It’s an easy blog post to write and helps take up the slack on a slow blogging day. Technically, if you’re publishing a lot of content on a large Website (like a news site or a community resource blog) your editorial calendar should include occasional rewrites of important topics (or you should revisit them as incidental digressions in important articles) — but I digress. We innately, at some intuitive level, understand as a community that we should all be handing out anti-Link Scheme warnings like candy. People will mostly ignore them or interpret them in ways so as not to identify their own practices as constituting link schemes. Everyone “Building” Links Is Using One […]
NoFollow, Wherefore Art Thou NoFollow?
Ah, “rel=’nofollow’”. How the SEO community loves and hates thee. I would count the ways but frankly I would die of boredom long before I reached the middle of the list. Nonetheless, it seems we cannot seem to divorce ourselves from discussion of the tiniest of link attributes, this mere trinket of self-deception and self-abuse. Why is it that people in our industry cannot get the facts straight about NoFollow? Why is it so hard to agree in one voice on what NoFollow is or is not? I have no idea and I’m not going to waste my time trying to figure that out, but here are a few of the latest misconceptions about “rel=’nofollow’” that are making the rounds. I provide them in no particular order. Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness. Matt Cutts, I will buy you and your wife a vacation in Hawaii if you can show me scientific evidence that putting “rel=’nofollow’” on a link discloses anything at all about the purpose or nature of the link. How in the hell is “NOFOLLOW” supposed to say “I’m a freaking paid link” as opposed to “I’m a link where I don’t want to […]