SMarT Marketing

The nofollow is a HTML attribute for links. The nofollow attribute supposedly excludes links from search engine ranking calculations. This attribute was first introduced by Google’s Matt Cutts and Blogger.com’s Jason Shellen.

 Example:

< a href=http://www.your domain.com rel="nofollow">Ancor Text < /a>

It has been found that Google still follows these links, but if the page was not in the index previously they will not index the page, will not show the link as a back link , and will not associate any keyword relevancy from the anchor text of the link.

Yahoo will follow the link and will index the page, show the link as a back link, and will use the keyword relevancy from the anchor text of the link. However they do exclude the link from their ranking calculations.

MSN has not been proven to follow the link. MSN does not count the nofollow links in their ranking calculations.

Sculpting Page Rank

Webmasters quickly found that they could use the nofollow attribute not only for external links, but internal links as well. Some people could control the flow of their Page Rank to pages on their own site that were deemed less important for search engines. Pages like your Shipping Information, Privacy Policy, Account Login really do not need to be indexed by the search engines.

How Can You Tell if a Site Uses Nofollow?

One way of seeing if a site uses the nofollow attribute is to view the web page’s source code. Then you need to comb through the HTML code to find a link. A faster way is to use the SEO for Firefox extension. This Firefox add-on provides a nice option to highlight the nofollow links right on the page.

If you MSN does get their hands on Yahoo this will definately open up the market for another player. Although MSN may try and keep the brand seperate, in the online world, this is very hard. It is a big move for both companies, but based on the huge shareholder incentive for Yahoo holders, this may just go through.

Came across a nice free tool for real estate agents called Postlets. The tool allows users to post properties to several main stream classified networks such as backpage, Google Base, Kijiji, Oodle and more. The site steps you through the process of creating your listing. This is a great tool to propogate your listings across some fo the bigger free classified networks. This application also works for selling cars, but on a more limited distribution.

Below is a chart taken directy from Google Analytics showing a spike in traffic. This spike occured from one comment (the first comment) on a related article that made the first page of Digg.com. If you come across an article on Digg that is related to your site, you may want to seriously consider adding a relevant comment that includes your url. You can often comment on both the Digg site and the page of the actual article.

I just posted a blog entry on one of my client’s sites and within 40 minutes the blog entry shows up second for the key term the blog entry was discussing. Is Google just that fresh or was I lucky enough to have the Google Bot visit the site right when I published the blog? Any how here is a screenshot of the listing.