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06.17.09 Is Expert SEO Testing Valuable?  By Aaron Wall About 2 weeks ago Danny Sullivan highlighted that Google follows Javascript links, and that sculpting PageRank using rel=nofollow no longer works. Matt Cutts shared that second bit to the shock and awe of the SEO industry at the recent SMX conference. And Nofollow Has Done so For Over a Year Now While Matt Cutts only recently announced the change, this change is something that was done over a year ago: More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each. Matt explained why they never disclosed the change back then: At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn't. In retrospect, we've changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn't notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn't have been such a surprise. So we started to provide other guidance that PageRank sculpting isn't the best use of time. Why Google Engineers Once Pushed Nofollow PageRank Sculpting Originally Google created rel=nofollow in what was claimed as an attempt to minimize the effects of blog comment spam on their search results. But the tag never decreased blog spam, it only decreased the ability of bloggers to influence search rankings by leaving back-scratching comments on each other's blogs. Matt Cutts quickly extended nofollow's purpose to include use on paid text link ads as well. But given that Google AdWords sells links (and often to scammers) some people may have seen trade issues with forcing the new proprietary nofollow tag onto the web. Promoting PageRank sculpting gave Google a way to legitimize a tag which otherwise added no value to anyone except search companies.
After enough time passed and Google saw too much collateral damage popping up from rel=nofollow usage, they pulled the rug out from underneath it. Nofollow already had enough momentum, and was a functional part of the web. After a Google employee slipped nofollow into a working draft of the HTML 5 specifications it was time time to clean up the mess and inform SEOs about the nofollow change that happened over a year ago. Some SEO Professionals Claimed Huge Benefits From PageRank Sculpting Over the last year many SEOs have claimed that nofollow tests worked amazingly well which show up directly in the bottom line. And ironically, sharing/hyping this incorrect information worked well from a marketing perspective because... • it makes them look cutting edge and allows them to sell additional services • writing about things which are new, uncertain, and untested yields links (because for every person who is an SEO expert there are 1,000 ditto-heads linking to whatever sounds new or important) What the SEOs were testing on their high profile public SEO websites was more a reflection of branding and marketing efforts. As they made noise in the marketplace their brand spread and that made more sales. We recently (maybe a month ago?) added nofollow to some links on our site, and we failed to see the lift that other SEOs claimed. And the SEOs that claimed to see the obvious huge amazing lift failed to report the drop off when Google changed how they handled nofollow, which sorta shows the error in the testing method. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, a dynamic website offering marketing tips and coverage of the search space, free SEO videos, and free SEO tools. He is a regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and publishes dozens of independent websites. |
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