SEOs wholeheartedly adopt nofollow snake oil — but guess what? It doesn’t work!
by Chris on Jun.18, 2009, under search marketing
Great article here on SEOBook about how SEOs have been obsessing over Page Rank Sculpting with Nofollow tags, when it turns out Google disabled the functionality over one year ago!
http://www.seobook.com/worthless-hype
More than a few SEOs out there have claimed that their proprietary testing processes have shown huge benefits could come from manipulating Google’s “link juice” with nofollow tags. I mean, they’ve tested it, and so they should know right? Well, turns out those SEOs may need to learn how to test.
Now, we do SEO, (and have since man walked on four legs), but we’ve always maintained that most of it is more common sense than secret sauce. But, we’ve seen the lure that SEO salesmen have on clients when they start talking about dark arts like page rank sculpting with nofollow tags.
The author, Aaron Wall–who I would love to buy a beer (or coke)–has a couple of theories why SEOs may have perpetuated this nofollow myth:
- It makes them look cutting edge and allows them to sell more services.
- Writing about things which are new, uncertain, and untested yields links.
- For every person who is an SEO expert there are 1,000 ditto-heads linking to whatever sounds new or important.
You know, that sounds just about right to me.
