Categories

Meta

Tags

Nofollow Tags Social Networking and SEO

Search

Archives

Recent Posts

Welcome to my SEO Blog!

Friday, November 25, 2011 posted by JohnCota

Thank you for visiting my SEO blog. I am John Cota, blogmaster and SEO specialist. I plan to blog here as much as possible to share questions, answers, and opinions regarding the latest issues affecting the SEO industry.

My background in search engine optimization (SEO) started in 1998 when I developed a website for my printing business. I realized shortly after launching the website that I was not getting very many visitors. Tackling that problem proved to be so intriguing that it drove me to sell my printing business and change careers in order to focus exclusively on SEO.

Over the years I have optimized many hundreds of websites that enjoy high search engine ranking on all of the major search engines including Google, Yahoo, and Bing with my RankHigh SEO Services business. I have learned over the years that the best way to please Google is to follow their recommendations (this is known as “whitehat SEO” while using tactics that Google disapproves of is termed “blackhat SEO”). My motto is, why use blackhat methods when whitehat works even better?

Please visit again soon!

Comments Off

Question: Is SEO A Scam?

Friday, October 21, 2011 posted by JohnCota

I have had people ask me, “John, is SEO a scam? What is all this talk of a page-one Google ranking… is it all a big ripoff?” My answer is that it all depends. SEO itself is not a scam, but people can become desperate to get their websites to the top of Google, and this in itself invites potential scammers to the table.

Every industry has its share of scammers, and the SEO field is not immune from it.  But there are some very legitimate SEO providers out there that are able to get their clients’ websites to the top of Google, and I am one of them. My company RankHigh SEO has been helping website owners rank high on Google since 2004, and I have a long list of repeat clients – because I get results.

That said, there are other factors that can determine the outcome of any SEO campaign. First and foremost, there is the content of the client’s website. Is it relevant to what the client is offering? Are the keywords in the content relevant to what the client’s potential customers might type into a Google search when looking for their product or service? And last but definitely not least, does the client’s website contain duplicate content that can be found on other websites?

Any good SEO campaign is only as good as the client’s website is. I have seen people throw money away on a perfectly good SEO campaigns, when their own website was a clone that they purchased on eBay and had been sold to hundreds of unsuspecting buyers. Unfortunately for them, Google now has sophisticated filters that remove duplicate content from the top of the search results, ruining the chance for them to get a top Google ranking. When this happens, even the best SEO campaign in the world cannot get the website to the top of Google.

Comments Off

Does Using Nofollow Tags Help Prevent PageRank Loss?

Wednesday, May 18, 2011 posted by JohnCota

This is a question that many SEO forums have hotly debated. Folks on one side of the argument believe that placing a nofollow tag in the outgoing links of their web pages will prevent “PageRank leakage”. In other words, they believe that they can link to any website regardless of its quality (or lack thereof) and Google won’t count it as an outgoing link from their web page.

Okay, it’s time to bust the myth. Matt Cutts of Google recently explained that while Google may not pass the PageRank from your web page link to a page that has a nofollow tag in it, the PageRank that would have been passed to the link is still deducted from your web page.

There are so many myths and rumors running rampant on SEO forums these days that people don’t know what to believe. That is mainly why I started this SEO blog – to debunk a few of them and offer some credible and proven advice instead.

Here’s an innovative idea – instead of worrying about passing good PageRank to bad sites, why not just link to good sites that are relevant to your website? Then you don’t have to worry about trying to spare your site from the mysterious “PageRank leakage” bandit.

Google wants you to link to other websites, and they won’t penalize you for it – provided the websites are of good quality and relevant to your web page. The web is built with links, and the nofollow tag was not invented to save PageRank from being passed – it was originally created to help stop comment spam on blogs.

Comments Off

Does Google Value Links from Twitter and Facebook Pages?

Monday, January 17, 2011 posted by JohnCota

This is a topic that many webmasters have wondered about. Let’s face it, not every link out there will help build your website’s link popularity and search engine ranking. It is well known that most forums and blogs use “nofollow” tags to prevent giving PageRank away to spammers’ websites. Is this the case with the social networking giants Twitter and Facebook? 

As Matt Cutts of Google correctly states, links from Twitter pages have nofollow tags in them. FaceBook also automatically inserts nofollow tags in links that are posted on FaceBook pages. For those of you who do not know what a nofollow tag is, allow me to explain by posting the Wikipedia definition:

nofollow is an 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. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

In order to get links that will help build your website’s PageRank and search ranking, you need to make sure they are not links with the nofollow tag in them. So, how can you tell which links have these tags in them? It’s simple, just do a View/Source check on the web page from your browser and look for the link in question (or you can use the Search Status plugin for Firefox that will highlight all nofollow tags on a page). If it has a nofollow tag next to it, the search engines will discount the link and not apply it to the link popularity of the web page it is pointing to. Here is an example of a nofollow tag in use:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount drugs</a>

As you can see, the link above has the nofollow tag in the HREF itself, meaning that search engines will not credit this link as they would a regular link that doesn’t have a nofollow tag in it.

Does this mean you should abandon social networking when it comes to your SEO efforts? Well, if you are adding links to Twitter and FaceBook in hopes that they will add to your web pages’ link popularity, I’d say you’d be better off going after links that will actually act as “votes” for your web pages in the search engine results. However, I am not discounting the value of social networking as a way to generate traffic to your web pages. You just need to keep in mind that if your goal is to increase the search engine ranking of your web pages, you must get links from sites that will pass PageRank onto them.

Tags: ,
Comments Off