This is a theory rather than fact so please feel free to disagree in the comments.
One of the most popular posts on Blogstorm is the Beginners Guide to Linkbait but it is the only post on this site that doesn’t rank for the terms in it’s title tag. It clearly has been hit with some kind of Google penalty.
All the links in the comments are nofollow so I can’t believe they are causing the problem. The only outgoing link that could cause the issue was one to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/ which is a page that also doesn’t rank for it’s own name despite having 5 million incoming links.
I’ve removed the link and will keep you updated.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Besides that, the only thing I could think off is the fact that you link to gravatar.com 64 times (without nofollow).
Otherwise I think your theory will hold. Let us know what the results are!
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All those links are nofollow or JS so they can’t be causing it (I hope). Also this issue was around before I switched to this avatar plugin.
More comments from Patrick AltoftAh, I didn’t notice the rel=nofollow in the code :$ Will you write a post about this issue in the future, or should I bookmark this post?
yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
how many high quality links does DP have? i mean most of them are awful, probably, but it must have SOME good links. do the bad links tip the scale in the opposite direction?
This is an interesting theory..I haven’t thought of this before..^^..well, keep us updated to what happens next..^^
You mean signatures at Digital Point are nofollow?
Interesting as such popular forums get linked to a lot.
Digital Point is flagged by all major search engines and social media sites, including digg, SU etc. It’s not a surprise that they harm rankings
Linking to or posting on a forum that is someone elses can always affect your your own websites rankings in some ways.
At least that is what I have managed to ascertain.
These ways are both positive and negative
I am personally agree, my site was got many link into DP.
Came across this posting (indirectly) from your thread at DP!
Sure would love to have an update to this posting!
I really want to know if you found out?
Yeah so am I, any results yet?
Quite interesting about linking. See you didn’t hyperlink it
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Never heard of this before. Thanks for the article.
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