SEO “No Follow”. Should you care?

“Want of care does us more damage than want of knowledge”

~ Benjamin Franklin

I think it’s clear that Ole’ Ben Franklin used that quote shortly after he was discovered to be a womanizing drunkard with what were then considered Scientology-esq leanings, because clearly, meh corpulent brother did not care about what people thought…

Yet, as my mother is often fond of saying “Gawd can speak even from an Ass”, which is the only reason you should ever listen to me – ’cause GAWD said so.

…and Welcome to Tuesday!  We’ve got a great show in store for you!

First, I’d like you to visit a web site that belongs to Mr. Jeff Walker.  On that site is a video with a Case-Study.

The Video is free, meaning there’s no opt-in to view it.  It’s about a new type of business model called “The Product Launch Manager”.  I have, over the last 2 months or so, been acting as a “Ninja Product Launch Manager”, and I have to say, Jeff’s on to something here.

But – WARNING: This is not for the faint of heart.  If you’re hardcore and ready to step up (And you already know if you are or are not), then watch this:

http://www.productlaunchformula.com/plmvidrs.php?18389

See that link?  That’s an AFFILIATE Link.  Yes.  It is.  I am endorsing Mr. Jeff Walker.  I also helped with the video, so I am, by proxy, endorsing my work as well (Let’s see the FTC figure THAT ONE out. Heh.)

Speaking of over-reaching (Government) agencies…

Google.   Some of us envision a day where you fire off a straight-armed salute with a bar-coded “666″ tattoo on your forearm – a tattoo that you’ll show jack-booted, leather clad “Web Clerics” before they approve your daily ration of Insta-Acai-Berry and FaceBook Wall Postings. They’re looking at you right now…

Yes – Quitting smoking has been great – thanks for asking.

Some think they are Evil.  Some think they’re smug.

I think they’re busted. Maybe not totally broken – just a little bent out of square. Why?  Because their recent announcement about the “No Follow” function sounds a bit like they’ve got a blue dress to hide…

With that image ricocheting around in your head, harken to today’s 2 videos – both exploring and debunking the mysteries of Google’s mysterious (har) No Follow Tag – and whether or not you should give a RIP.

No Follow Nonsense.  Part 1 of 2.

Watch and listen as Leslie Rohde breaks our hearts by revealing that Page Rank from No Follow Links actually EVAPORATES – pretty much defying the Conservation of Energy Theory and re-writing the Laws of Physics – thanks GOOGLE! (Now would be a good time to check for that tattoo…)

No Follow Nonsense. Part 2 of 2.

I’m sorry… Did Leslie just say what I though he said?


  • Pam

    ok you have strolled out of the area that I even remotely understand what you are talking about. .the videos today might as well have been in Swahili for all I understood a word of them. Nevertheless, I still look forward to every video and make sure I read every email from you!! This is amazing to me and I wish I could distill how you DO that.
    Btw, hang in there with quitting smoking…rumor has it it gets easier and you will hate yourself if you go back to smoking after suffering all of the anguish..and you’d just have to do it all over again sooner or later anyway :) . Good on you for quitting!

  • http://www.squidoo.com/video-games-store Rita

    Well, glad I’m so small it doesn’t matter, cause I had alot of trouble understanding this stuff. Guess I’ll just keep plugging away.

  • http://faq-tastic.com Zain Bador

    Hey Andy,

    Thanks for another interesting video. From experience, I’ve seen my client sites built on WP grow pretty quickly, so getting to the point where there’s several hundred pages is pretty easy to do over the course of a year (if you’re adding content on a regular basis).

    With this in mind, I’m just wondering if users who are starting out and building their sites in WordPress should actually be thinking about nofollow now, rather than later on. Would it be better to plan out the structure of a site first (thinking about growth) and then stick to it, or just let it grow then “sculpt it back”? What’s the best course of action?

    Anyway, I’m looking forward to your next video on First Link Priority. It’s something I took away from the old Stomper days and still use today (over 2 years on!). In terms of site structure, my new themes have the header and top navigation links coming *after* my main content, followed by the navigation items at the bottom… the main content *always* comes first. But then, I build my sites with “accessibility” in mind (and have skip links) rather than SEO. Funnily enough, if you think about it, a site that is accessible for users with disabilities works really well for SEO too. It also has an added advantage: if it ever comes to the point where a person with a disability sues an owner of a website for it being inaccessible, then I’m pretty much covered. It wouldn’t surprise me if that day will come… In these litigious times, I hope I’m not giving people ideas… :P

    Cheers,

    Zain

    • http://faq-tastic.com Zain Bador

      PS: Aww man… you quit smoking? I hope you don’t become one of those “born again” non-smokers. Think about all that networking you’ll miss out on at events… Internet Marketing is all about going against the norm… smoking is too!

      Damn… Well… good luck with it. I know you’re a guy who know’s what he’s doing… I’m off for a cigarette now. I’ll have one for you to make up for one less cigarette in the world…

      …And yes, I am playing the Devil’s advocate, just to test your will-power! :P

      • http://www.andyjenkinsblog.com Andy Jenkins

        Damn you Zain. Damn you.
        :)

  • Pam2

    Andy – that email was hilarious – thanks for the grin and giggles!
    If quitting smoking is making you even funnier then you already are . . .
    maybe I should think about quitting too . . . nahhh –
    Wait up Zain, I’ll join ya! ;o)

  • Pingback: Tweets that mention SEO “No Follow”. Should you care? -- Topsy.com

  • Tim

    Ummm, WHAT?

  • Pam

    I am in despair! I have been able to get the videos fine from the emails but when I tried to go back and go through them again I can’t get them to run! I ended up deleting them all :( Other videos I have downloaded work…is there some trick to these ones? NONE of them worked! I am going to try again while they are hopefully still around, as I really really wanted to keep them for reference.

  • http://themoxiemomblog.com Wendy Merritt

    Whew! That just made my life a whole lot easier! Thanks for the great article and the great videos. This means I now have more time to focus on fabulous content. Nice.

    Blessings,
    Wendy

  • Raghava Satish

    Hey Andy i love the way you write your posts. I don’t have access to computer where i can watch these videos but i think they are jam packed with content. I accept with the above comment that sites must be accessable and the accessability helps in good rankings in search engines.

    I am visually impaired and i have a friend who works on web accessability and he is visually challenged too. we see that lot of people concentrate on design and giving lot of colouring on the site instead of making it easy to navigate and accessable.

  • Bora

    Hi Andy (and Leslie).

    I understood that no follow is partially ignored by Google but still stops PR flow.
    What effect does this now have on creating e.g. ezinearticles, Squidoo Pages etc. that link back to your site? Both have set nofollow tags to outgoing links but they are the classical backlinking strategy. Are they still good to do and frankly why do they work?

    Other than creating more pages on my own sites, what external things can I still do to rank better? Social bookmarking seems out, unpaid directories (?probably not very effective anymore), a few ezinearticles don’t do the job – Please provide a little bit on insight.

    Thanks,
    Bora

  • http://www.consumerwatchreport.com Watches

    Thank again Andy…
    That concludes the No follow hype..

    I am looking forward to the next video on first link priority!

    Cheers my man!!

  • Jeremy

    Thanks for putting these up ;)

    Looks like it is just going more towards inforcing their philosophy of “build for users not for spiders”.

    More pages…got it!

  • http://polprav.blogspot.com/ Polprav

    Hello from Russia!
    Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?

    • http://www.andyjenkinsblog.com Andy Jenkins

      Quote away!

  • http://store.globalhemp.com/ Global Hemp

    Being a subscriber to StomperNet, the Global Hemp Store has implemented “nofollow” links for non-important pages such as “Privacy Policy” and “Terms and Conditions” since we do not want to loose “link juice” for a page that we do not care to rank for.

    The Global Hemp Store is built on Volusion platform, so we do not have full control over the template. The store template is in HTML tables and we are not able to have full control over the output either. It is best to structure HTML — either via tables of CSS “tableless” — by positioning the “content” first and foremost in the underlying XHTML code, and use CSS to layout the header as being virtually at the top of the page. This was explained for your armory store in Stomping the Search Engines 1.