« Plan Ahead and Submit Early: Lesson from the Super Bowl | Google Sitemaps Adds Additional Features »
February 14, 2006
Q&A - Is Yahoo now following the nofollow tag? What about other search engines?
Courtesy of SearchEngineNews.com | January 2006
Planet Ocean Communications, the top-rated source of search engine marketing information.
Last month you reported that none of the major search engines were following nofollow tags. Since that time, I've heard reports that some people are seeing nofollowed links show up in their backlinks. What's going on?
Answer: Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us are rapidly becoming important to search engine optimization, though for a slightly different reason than you might expect.
Links from such sites actually aren't worth a whole lot from a search engine perspective because they use the noarchive,nofollow,noindex robots meta tag at the top of their bookmarks pages.
However, these social bookmarking tools can be used to drive traffic to your site if they're used correctly. The way to do that is to tag your pages with the keywords relevant to them. This can especially increase the exposure of new blog posts.
For example, let's say you have a blog about ringtones. After making a blog post, you can post it to your delicious account and tag it with keywords like ringtones, cellphone, and mobile.
Your page's link and description would then show up on these pages...
http://del.icio.us/tag/ringtones
http://del.icio.us/tag/cellphone
http://del.icio.us/tag/mobile
...all having their own RSS feed that is often subscribed to by bloggers and other people interested in tracking the latest news about these keywords.
Your goal should be to increase the chances that interested people will see the link to your site. Obviously, a certain number will click through and, if your post or article is a good one, some of them will probably link to you from their own sites.
Also, a link to your post will show up on this page (but only for two minutes): http://del.icio.us/recent
And, if enough people find your page worthy of tagging with their own del.icio.us accounts, then it could show up on this page: http://del.icio.us/popular/
Getting listed on the del.icio.us "popular" page can potentially send you a huge amount of traffic—but getting there isn't always easy since it depends on creating something that a large number of people will find tag-worthy.
As you can see, the link-building effect of a site like del.icio.us is indirect. The links from del.icio.us confer no ranking benefit in themselves, but they can be used to send traffic to your site. Obviously, if you have something good to offer, a certain number of page visitors will also link to you.
At worst, however, the traffic boost will be non-existent if the content is mediocre or bad. And, even good content will often be ignored if it doesn't catch on with a large group of people. While a site like del.icio.us can be used to increase the exposure of your site, we don't recommend tagging your own pages unless they are truly exceptional. Otherwise, you're just increasing the clutter on the site. And boring pages are not likely to result in any increase in traffic or links.
The above article is reprinted with permission from Planet Ocean's SearchEngineNews.com, copyright 2006, and distributed with permission by WebTrends maker of WebPosition, the award-winning software that helps track and improve your search engine rankings. You may download a FREE trial copy of WebPosition from: http://www.webposition.com/trial/
← What is this?
