SEM/SEO

Marc Macalua talks about nofollow on his blog. Marc is the founder of SEO Philippines, who is very much an authority in SEO in the Philippines talked about the nofollow attribute in anchor tags and why does comment spamming still exist.

Even before Isulong SEOph, I was pretty much aware of the nofollow attribute in anchor tags. And during the Isulong SEOph SEO contest, which was my first SEO contest, we have seen a lot of comment spam that got the attention of SEOBook author Aaron Wall and popular V7N contest competitor Jim Westergren. I have also blogged about the nofollow attribute before.

Marc currently has a nice post about the nofollow showing that Yahoo still seems to follow the nofollow. But personally, my gut feeling is giving me doubts. In the previous SEO Contest, Isulong SEOph, domains were not older than 2006. Some had keyword rich domains and many also did not and just used the power of subdomains and folders. Several things I noticed with other high ranking sites was they were ranking high even most of their backlinks were nofollow links. I decided to look further into these competitors websites and I noticed these:

• I paid attention to the top sites in the SERPs of the Isulong SEOph contest and many of them did not have many links. I believe the 1st and 2nd place winners had less links than others. And many of them also had a large amount of nofollow links.
• Their keyword density was not that high as well compared to others.
• All the links were not all relevant and some not with high PR.

And why am I mentioning all of this? Because many of the links of the winners were nofollow links, which makes me start to doubt that the nofollow is not being followed.
But before you start believing in me, and start spamming the world, here are also some things you might want to consider thinking of first.

• Some of them could be ranking high because of the time factor? And they did their efforts early and as other were working in a later point in time, even if they have better links, it just did not pay off in time for the awarding.
• We all know number of inbound links from a website increases ranking. But maybe a link with a nofollow attribute is not counted as a link that helps ranking, but maybe perhaps it is still read in a way to help search engines investigate the topics of websites just to do a relevancy check. There is no proven statement about this and this is just based on personal observation. But the length of time of my observation may not be sufficient enough to say these observable results are a good hypothesis and everything is just a case of coincidence.
• Some have added links slowly, some pretty fast, which we also know is a factor with regards to ranking.
• Some websites were updated more often than others. And a site that updates more frequently, is crawled more frequently.

People that spam everyday, do it even if they do not know if it works or not, simply because for spammers, it is easy to spam. It is just a push of a button. i have seen work like this before with a Russian friend of mine that uses a software, I can’t remember if it is xRumer or xRummer. But I tried checking the domains xrumer.com, xrumer.net, xrumer.org, xrumer.info, xrummer.com, xrummer.net, xrummer.org, xrummer.info and none of them seem to be the official site. But I remember getting to it through a link one of these domains also. When I saw this software in action, it can post to 30,000 website with a push of a button. It can post on forums, blog comments and guestbooks automatically. So there are still tons of spammers today simply because they do not care, since it is so easy for them to spam anyway.

Posted in General SEO Knowledge | 6 Comments »

Posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 5:16 am under General SEO Knowledge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.