Stephan Spencer has an interesting post over at Search Engine Land today entitled Twelve SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make. Most of the article is great advice but there are two tips that I really don’t agree with.
Not using rel=nofollow to strategically direct the flow of link gain. Some internal links aren’t very helpful because they have suboptimal anchor text (e.g. “Permalink” and “Comments”). Some external links just leak link gain to nobody’s benefit, such as “Digg this” links.
According to Google, nofollow is for links that are either paid links, links you can’t editorially vouch for or links you know are to a bad neighbourhood. Using nofollow on your internal pages isn’t going to help your rankings. The article also suggests that linking to Digg at the end of each post might “leak” some of your link juice.
The web is built on links. Worrying about leaking PageRank isn’t good for your site and certainly isn’t going to help your rankings.
Only one RSS feed, and it’s not even optimized. Each category on your blog should have its own category, so that people who are mostly interested in just one topic can subscribe to – and hopefully syndicate – the category-specific feed. Same thing applies if you have tag pages hosted on your blog. Tag-specific feeds are great for users and for SEO. Optimized RSS feeds are ones that are “full text” not summary feeds, have more than just ten items (e.g. 20 or 50), have keyword-rich item titles, incorporate your brand name in the item titles, include important keywords in the site title, and have a compelling site description.
RSS feeds are designed to help users digest your content without having to visit your website on a daily basis. The one thing you don’t want to start doing is worrying about adding keywords and brand names into your titles.
The rest of the tips in the article are solid but I really don’t agree with the two above. What do you think?
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.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Worrying about PageRank “leaks” is sooo SEO 1.0
Hi Patrick, I must agree with you on both points. when I subscribe to a blog, I want to see everything that blogger is writing. I do not think I will ever subscribe to a single category blog.
Hiya. Glad you liked *most* of my article.
Just to clarify, I’m not suggesting you hoard your PageRank and not link out. That’s stingy and bad karma. Definitely pass PageRank to sites you mention within posts — unless you don’t vouch for the particular site because it’s dodgy in some way. However, links to Digg voting forms, to Email This Page forms, to Comments, etc. are fair game for the nofollow because they are links that don’t add value and are strategically unimportant from an SEO perspective. Also, Google doesn’t restrict the use of nofollow to solely external links you don’t vouch for.
In regards to RSS, if your feed is getting syndicated or read by influential bloggers, then the item title will very likely be used as the anchor text in the link they point to you. If it is not keyword optimized, then you’ll miss some of the opportunity.
Only having links to internal pages using highly relevant anchor text is sooo Wikipedia.
Most people regard Wikipedia as Web2.0 and it seems to do well in search, even for pages that only have internal links.
Links to forms that are not blocked off with robots.txt may be blocked off by Google algorithmically, but why take the chance? That is not only bookmark buttons but your subscription buttons in the sidebar.
When you see people with blogs that have PR5 or PR6 internal pages, whilst their homepage is PR2, you know there is still some benefit in channelling juice effectively around your site.
I know toolbar pagerank isn’t the best indicator, and pagerank isn’t everything.
If you keep the 80:20 rule in mind, if it only takes 5 minutes to switch from using a plugin that has followed links to social bookmark sites to one that has nofollow or uses javascript, in my mind that is an easy and sensible decision.
For bloggers looking to monetize, splitting feeds isn’t a great idea.
I would have to agree partly with the original article. It’s important to optimize all your content, and having keywords in your RSS feed titles should help your readers tell what it’s about more easily.
As far as the nofollow tag goes, Stephan’s right. Google doesn’t explicitly exclude the nofollow tag’s use on different types of links, and even under your definitions, the Digg Voting button isn’t an editorial link anyway, so it shouldn’t be providing link value.
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