The Myth Of NoFollow Tag

Nofollow tag is an automated tag on every blog now and almost on all sites too that accepts user suggestion as comments or via guest book. So what is this tag and what's its purpose?

According To Wikipedia (Yeah wikipedia knows SEO too)

"nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index."

According To Google

"When Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results."

nofollow tag look like this



Many webmaster and SEO's believe the wikipedia and Google definition for nofollow tag that is nofollow tag effects a site ranking in Google Search Results. In many seo and webmaster forums we have seen a lot of debate on this issue, which always result in two conclusion. One is of course according to google point of view, that nofollow effect ranking position. But there is also some SEO who believe in somethin else. According to them NOFOLLOW only effects pagerank of a webpage and not ranking.

According to those SEO's

"The new nofollow link tag is supposed to provide webmasters with the opportunity to add a link to their website without leaking PageRank to the page they are linking to."

According to PageRank Theory

All links on a page which have some page rank got equally divided part of that pagerank to them too. This phenomena also known as Page Rank Dilution.

Here is a complete info about Page Rank: Google Page Rank

For example If a page has 4 page rank. And it contains 10 links on it of other websites than these 10 links get equally divide Page Rank Love from that page. This will increase the page rank points of those 10 pages, have their links on that page.

So what is the reality? Which theory is true and which one is false?

And yes! you may not believe it but 2nd theory is true.

It has been experimented by ME (OK I am not giving you any single detail of those experiments for the obvious reason, but sharing with you the proven result. So still I am good) and many other SEO'z too that link with nofollow tag doesn't affect a web page ranking. In fact it may count as a normal link and play its role in enhancing your ranking as number of links increases.

And since nobody caring a damn about Page Rank now days except Google itself, so these nofollow tags are pretty USELESS. For prove, you can analyze backlinks of some sites on 1st page of google and amazed to find that many of them have their links from blogs using nofollow tag. May be you can't see them for highly targeted keywords but remember Google is sorting out result manually for those keywords. Giving you a little common sense hint that if a page has 5 page rank with 100 links pointing to it from other blogs and you have a nofollow link of your website on that page, what do you think your link worth? Or lets have a fun experiment...Find an .edu blog and comment on some post of it. In NAME section put your keyword or simply put your web page url in comment. Since all blogs have nofollow tags installed automatically, so your this link is a nofollow link. After some days you can see this link as your edu backlink and an increase in your website authority.

So I am not advising you to do spam blogs via comments, but to acknowledge you that nofollow tag is only a myth and it doesn't negatively effect your ranking or its only a myth that a link with nofollow tag have no benefit.

So! Happy commenting.

P.S. In upcoming days I will surely post on importance of .edu and .gov links and how to get them. So better subscribe to RSS cause you certainly don't want to be the one left behind.

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Monday SEO Tool

TOOL CATEGORY = LINK BUILDING

This Monday Tool is regarding blogs and fall into the category of Link Building spamming. Since almost all the blogs and websites that accepts content from users are using NOFOLLOW TAG, So putting your website url in such blogs is useless according to some SEOz. Since every problem has a solution, So after searching for a long time, I finally succeeded to find a tool through which I can search all the relevant blogs that are not using NOFOLLOW Tag.

Commenthunt is a blog search tool that allows user to search relevant blogs that are not using NOFOLLOW Tag. Its a custom Google search engine basically and consist of more than 1000 DOFOLLOW blogs of different niches. So to whatever niche your blog is related to, this tool is for you. Instead of wasting your time in commenting on the blogs which uses NOFOLLOW, why not utilize this practice to get some links for your blog! Here is the screen shot of Commenthunt.com

TOOL URL= Commenthunt Blog Search Engine

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Google Page Rank Update And Paid Links

What is a Paid Link or Paid Inclusion?

"Paid inclusion is a search engine marketing model in which Web site owners pay a search engine company to guarantee their sites will show up in search results."

But then this definition changed when this process of buying links spreads from search engines to individually run websites and blogs. Companies started preferring to have their links shown on a blog having higher visitors or Page Rank with more visibility i.e. having a small banner on side bars of a web page or a banner at the end of the article.

Now according to Page Rank Theory, each web page having some Page Rank pass its juice equally to the links placed on that page. Someone then publish a theory that High Page Rank is effecting your ranking in Google SERP's.

After this a new era of paid linking starts. People start placing their adds on the webpages having high Page Rank.

This situation alert Google About its Paid Link Program known as AdWords and it start yelling that Paid Links are spam and they should be taken down.(According to Google, Adwords doesn't pass Page Rank, but who knows? Yahoo claims the similar thing about its directory, but every one knows that listing in yahoo directory not only got a significant change in Yahoo Search ranking but also a boost in Google Page Rank and Google SERP's). But who don't like to earn? ofcourse people utilizes there energy, money and time and if they are getting ROI cause of it, its their right to have it. So nobody cares about Google Yelling and bloggers and website owners kept showing links on their website or blog for a little sum of money. Many Start-up comes into being for this purpose to connect Link Publishers and companies and earn as a middleman. Of course this is the limit of Google Anger and recently it openly starts penalizing the websites involve in this business and showing who is the boss. It drops the Page Rank of many websites as a starter warning but this could go beyond the Page Rank. Since Page Rank is an important factor when buying links so it fires the blogger world and we have seen some harsh kool comments over Google Policy in previous week. But Google don't have time to reanalyze its policies so it just ignore all of them.

Here are some Google clarification over their Paid Links Policy

• According to Google co-founder Larry Page, any search result that was paid for should be clearly marked as an ad.

• Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

* Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the link
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

• According to Google, Paid Links are meant to pass the Page Rank to other blogs and thats why they are not good. So we should use rel=nofollow tag on every paid link we have on our blog to stop passing page rank to them.

So, let's see I placed an add on a page with zero page rank with out NOFOLLW. Is Google still penalized me? If we see Google Paid Link Policy than I should not be penalized cause I am not passing any Page Rank but we don't have an answer of this question yet.

Then how can Google know this is Paid Link? A link of my friend's sites without NOFOLLOw in my side bar can be declared As a Paid Link by Google but a paid link in my main article can't even recognize by Google as paid link.

Of course, they can do what they want with their own software. But at least give a clear definition on HOW OR WHAT METHODS THEY ARE USING TO MARK PAID LINKS so we can do some counter. But we only have an official statement from Matt Cutts that

Yes! this Page Rank drop down is due to Paid Links."

A good thing is that, this time Google decided only to give a warning by dropping that green pixels only. Nobody claims about loss of SERPS or ranking on general. SEOMOZ gives a nice data regarding this issue. You will find it really interesting. Take a look here. LINK

BTW Yahoo directory goes from 9 to 7 and Business.com also goes from 8 to 7.

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Yahoo Is On Move Again!

And Yes, Yahoo is now on move again. According to Sharad Verma Of Yahoo! Search they are rolling out some new features added in their algorithm to rank websites in next coming days. SO be ready to see some changes in your yahoo rankings.

Plus Yahoo announces support for X robot tags in http headers for no index, noindex, nofollow and nosnippet functions. Previously you can use these tags within html only but from now on you can use it in http header which gives you more flexibility to achieve exclusions on PDF, Word documents, PowerPoint, video, and other file types including html files. Here are some examples of using X robot Tags given by yahoo:

• X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX -- If you don't want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.

Note: We'll still need to crawl the page to see and apply the tag, so if you don't wish to have the page crawled, use robots disallow on robots.txt.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE -- If you don't want to display cache link in the search results page.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET -- If you don't want to display summary in the search results page.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW -- If you don't want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.

You can read full story here LINK

OnPage SEO Factors

The most important On Page optimization techniques include content optimization, the title-tag, several META-Tags, headlines & text decoration, alt- and title-attributes and continuous actualization.
(1) Content Optimization
This is a tough one, because you should of course concentrate on your user and easy readability, but you always have to have an eye on the search engines as well. For your users it's clear what a certain page is about if it's written in the headline, but for search engines it's better to repeat the important keywords several times. So you have to strike the right balance:

• Concentrate on your users first
  That's what the website is about - you don't sell your products or services to search engines but to people. And if they don't get what you're saying or find it hard to read through your website they very likely hit the back button of their browser and visit your competition.
• Then modify for search engines
  If you got your text together go over it again and try to get some more keywords and phrases in where they fit and make sense. There is no certain amount or percentage that is best, just make sure to just use them a couple of times. The best ways to avoid using them too often are to use different words and phrases and to create some lists. Lists are always good to bring in some keywords.

(2) TITLE-Tag
It is displayed at the top of your browser and it is also used as the title of your website in the SERPs. Therefore you should take your time and think about the best title for your page. Important aspects of the title-tag:

1. Give every page of your website its own title and don't use one title for the whole website.
2. It should contain no more than around 10-12 words.
3. Think of it as a short ad copy, because that's basically it when users see them on the SERPs.

(3) META-Tags
META-Tags are not as important any more as they used to be. That's basically because people started using them to spam search engines - especially the keyword-tag was heavily used for that. Nevertheless there are still some important META-Tags you should use. The description-tag is probably the most important META-Tag. It is displayed in the SERPs and you should select it as carefully as the title-tag. Important aspects of the description-tag:

1. Give every page of your website its own description and don't use one description for the whole website.
2. The description -tag is one of the few meta-tags that still positively influences your website's ranking, so it's good to use your most important keywords in it.
3. It should contain not more than around 25-30 words.
4. Think of it as a short ad copy, because that's basically it when users see them on the SERPs.

The NOODP-Tag is quite new and tells the search engines to don't use the title- and description-tags they find if you have an entry at the DMOZ. This is especially helpful of you are not satisfied with the tags there, or you want to change them. Everyone who ever had something to do with changes at the DMOZ knows that we are not talking about days or weeks if it comes to how long that can take.

So if you use the NOODP-Tag you are basically telling the search engines that they must not use the data from DMOZ entry, but instead, use the tags that are currently on your website. It's said that Google may ignore the general NOODP-Tag!

The robots-tag is used to tell the search engines (e.g. spiders or robots) what they shall do with your website. Possible entries are index, follow, noindex and nofollow - whereas index/noindex tells the search engine whether to index the page or not noindex/nofollow tells them to follow the links or not.

(4) Headlines and text decoration
Headlines should not only be used to structure your content and keep it easy to read, but also for SEO reasons. Search engines tend to give headlines between H1, H2, etc tags more relevancy - H1 being the most relevant headline. Just like the headlines also other text decorations can help search engines identify the most important party of your website. Use bold, italic or bold italic to mark some text where it's useful and also try to create some lists with bullets. Everything of course with an eye on your defined keywords and phrases.

(5) TITLE and ALT Attributes
Title - and alt - attributes are used to describe text-links and images. It's not only for search engine reasons you should use them, but also for accessibility. They are shown if you move the mouse over links and images. Besides, the alt-attribute is shown if the image isn't (yet) loaded.

(6) Keep it up-to-date
Search engines always want new content, so feed them! Not only your website will grow automatically if you always add something to it, but also search engines tend to spider your website more often if they always find something new.

Originally BY Martin Muehl : LINK

Google Page Rank

Google Page Rank..the green bar on Google tool bar ranking the web page by giving it points from 10. Ever wonder what is its purpose? Why it is so important(IT IS IMPORTANT)? Why one want 10 out of 10 (OK its a real tough task nearly impossible) or want an increase in it? These and many more questions about Page Rank are constantly raised by many peoples and SEO’s too. Here is a “summary”(not the same article) of most comprehensive study originally done by smashing magazines about Google Page Rank. The most kool thing about this article are the tools that provided with the article about Page Rank. Read it and see that what you know about Page Rank till now is rite or…?

What is PageRank?
It is one of the factors that Google Use for measuring importance of a page. Moreover it has nothing to do with page quality or topic relevancy. Its only measure the importance of a page by counting how many links that page got.

“Google uses many factors in ranking. Of these, the PageRank algorithm might be the best known. PageRank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites. With PageRank, five or six high-quality links from websites such as www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com would be valued much more highly than twice as many links from less reputable or established sites.”

By Google Librarian Central

How Does PageRank work?
Ok this thing is still under study (obviously by SEO’s) How that things work. An equation is derived to calculate how it works or how it ranks a page. Here it is

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)).

That’s the equation that calculates a page’s PageRank. In the equation ‘t1 - tn’ are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

One thing is also said that If a page got PR 10 and it got only one link on it than this link will get the wholw link juice and get a fair amount of PR too. So having a link on a page with greater Pr is important but number of links on that page is also important.

Since Google Page Rank is logarithmic in its calculation so each Page Rank level is progressively harder to reach. If it takes 10 steps to reach for PR1 than it will take 25 steps to reach for PR 2. Page rank update after every 3 or 4 months. Here is another interesting thing about Page rank is..

“PageRank is based on incoming links, but not just on the number of them. Instead PageRank is based on the value of your incoming links. To find the value of an incoming link look at the PR of the source page, and divide it by the number of links on that page. It’s very possible to get a PR of 6 or 7 from only a handful of incoming links if your links are “weighty” enough”

FACTORS EFFECTING AND NOT-EFFECTING PAGE RANK

• Inbound Link
• Adding Pages Decrease Page Rank
• Decrease in Page Rank of Pages that have link of your website
• Links from and to high quality related sites
• Content updates don’t improve PR
• Content is not taken into account when PageRank is calculated
• Page Rank doesn’t consider site age, backlink relevancy and backlink duration.
• Wikipedia Links don’t improve Page Rank after they implemented NO FOLLOW TAG .
• Listing in DMOZ and Yahoo! doesn’t give your site a special PR Bonus
• .edu and .gov-sites still contraversal
• Links marked with nofollow-attribute don’t contribute to Google PageRank.
• Links from one page to itself don’t improve Page Rank
• Bad incoming links don’t have impact on Page Rank
• Dangling links(links that point to any page with no outgoing links) don’t have impact on Page Rank.
• Efficient internal linking
• Anchor text
• Links from top ranked pages in Google

GOOGLE PAGE RANK RELATED TOOLS

All Pages PR
All Pages PR of your website in simple text format

Page Rank From Different Data Centers
Page Rank on different 30 data centers plus genral info about website

Page Rank Calculator
A calculator to determine share of Page rank

Live Page Rank
See the Live and current Page Rank for a website.