Search Engine Optimization for Site Owners and Small Businesses

“If we value the pursuit of knowledge we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us”. Adlai E. Stevenson II from a speech at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, October 8, 1952.

This is a compendium of our experiments and the experiments of others to determine how the major search engines currently treat the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

A few months ago I placed a rel=”nofollow” on one of the existing test pages that we had used in the past to determine the search engine indexing behavior of keywords in urls. The link was placed to a new test page with style=”text-decoration:none” to reduce the possibility of someone clicking it and signaling the existence of the new ‘linked to’ page as a referrer. Here is a partial screen shot of the page in Firefox using the SearchStatus extension which highlights rel=”nofollow” links. There are no other links to the new test page.

Google, Yahoo and MSN are now showing a recent cache of the page and we can see how they handled the link.

We know that Google and Yahoo follow rel=”nofollow” links in the sense that they will visit the ‘linked to’ page. Valentin Agachi reported this in detail some time ago in his post Does rel=nofollow work? So for our own experiment and starting with the simplest behavior first:

MSN appears not to have spidered and certainly has not indexed the ‘linked to’ page:

Yahoo has spidered and indexed the ‘linked to’ page:

Yahoo also shows the page in the serps at 14/64 for an exact search on the anchor text.

Google has spidered but not indexed the page:

Mark Barrera in his post “nofollow” - Does it Really Work Like Google Claims? has shown that if the ‘linked to’ page is in the index already then Google will rank the page for the anchor text. Google will also acknowledge the link on the cached page with “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page”.

Here is a summary of all our findings:

What we can’t know for sure is if the search engines are completely disregarding the rel=”nofollow” in their algorithms. Google says in the Official Google Blog “When Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results”. MSN appears to disregard rel=”nofollow” links in every aspect and Yahoo seems to treat rel=”nofollow” links the same way as any other link but they are probably disregarding them for ranking purposes.

A previous post in the Tutorial on Reciprocal Links gives examples of good and bad reciprocal links. It concludes by saying “that reciprocating a link will not automatically make a good link bad or indeed make a bad link good, what is important are the individual links themselves”. This post emphasizes the dangers of reciprocal links.

Google has deployed a new infrastructure and software upgrade of their crawling and indexing. Codenamed Bigdaddy it started to roll out in February and was fully deployed by the end of March when the old system was turned off. Matt Cutts has been addressing some of the anomalies that SEOs have noticed in a long post on his blog.

He mentions reciprocal links four times in the post and here are the relevant paragraphs excerpted:

1. The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.

2. As these indexing changes have rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling.

3. I think this is covered by the same guidance as above; if you were getting crawled more before and you’re trading a bunch of reciprocal links, don’t be surprised if the new crawler has different crawl priorities and doesn’t crawl as much.

4. Some folks that were doing a lot of reciprocal links might see less crawling.

The message could not be clearer, don’t use reciprocal link exchanges as the basis of your link building campaign.

December 15, 2006 As if to underline what is said above the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post in which the following is written: “To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is”. You can read the complete post at Building link-based popularity.

Also here is a quote the previous month from Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist at Google, in Google Groups: “…reciprocal links have been around forever, and Google doesn’t frown on engaging in reciprocal linking in moderation. The key here is, indeed, moderation :). If, say, 90% of your backlinks are reciprocal, that’s probably not going to improve how our algorithms view your site. Or worse, if 90% of your backlinks are reciprocal and not likely to be of interest to your user. But exchanging links here and there — *especially* when done with clear editorial judgement (e.g., you’re not just accepting dozens of link exchanges willy-nilly) — that’s not the sort of thing Google looks down upon”

19 December 2007

Matt Cutts in a Pubcon question and answer session said “Trading links is a natural thing around the Web. Natural reciprocal links do happen but if 50 percent of your links are coming from link exchanges it begins to looks like you’re trying to build an artificial reputation and bump up the amount of links you don’t have”.

Directory links can be a useful source of inbound links and a good way to obtain the initial 200+ links to your site but do not consider them a substitute for quality inbound links. Submission to SEO friendly general directories and niche directories (directories specialized by industry or geography) should be done carefully and methodically. (See update at end of post).
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A reciprocal link exists if website A links to website B and website B links to website A. There is more misinformation and obfuscation on reciprocal links than almost any other subject because mutually agreed link exchanges are falsely believed to be 100% effective in achieving high search engine rankings.

Whole businesses have been built around link exchanges and millions of site owners have bought into the myth. Lured by extravagant promises they have purchased automated link exchange software or indulged in organized link exchange schemes only to discover that their site never achieves their objectives and sometimes even gets banned by the search engines.
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Inbound links and their anchor text are the second most important factor in SEO after the title element. Certainly in terms of the time involved inbound links will be the area where most of your effort in SEO will be expended.

There are five main aspects to consider when obtaining inbound links:

• The anchor text
• The linking page (the page on which the link is situated)
• The linking site (the site which contains the page the link is on)
• The linked page (the page on your site that is linked to)
• Acquisition or link building (how to get them)

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