Page 2 - Meta nofollow... will this help site ranking?

Then refute my post above where I disprove it. You have yet to offer us anything more then, "because I think so".

You also avoided my question: if it is just speculation then why do you say your blog post is a credible source to believe outbound links matter? Are you both speculating and stating it as fact? It doesn't work that way. Even worse, your only source of information is your blog. How can you cite yourself as a reference?



Actually you should visit SitePoint.com/forums and check out their SEO forums. Besides the fact that it is the best around for SEO, you'll see I am the SEO Guru of the year and also wrote our very popular SEO and Google FAQs. Give them a read. I think you'll learn something.

Additionally, I have had paid contracts for $5,000/month for SEO work and turn down over $100,000 in SEO work a year (in case you are wondering I don't enjoy doing it on sites I am not affiliated with). I have also been interviewed for a popular UK Web magazine which should be published shortly and have turned down countless paid SEO blogging jobs. I also ran a joke website that ranked #2 in Google for jokes and #1 for almost every other secondary term before I took it down (long story). In case you didn't know 'jokes' is one of the most highly searched terms.

So you run our own SEO blog which anyone can do (and it seems everyone does). What else do you have on your SEO resumé?

BTW, when I gave your negative rep I didn't take anyway points. Giving negative rep because someone is disagreeing with you and providing good points as to why is childish. Debates and disagreements are part of the forum's purpose. It promotes discussion and offers alternative ideas to be explored.

Okay first of all your blowing this way out. You are providing no more evidence then me. I said it was a theory. A theory I have tested and it has been totally positive, a theory shared by 4 prominent seo in the industry, but a theory none the less.
But you provide not even a statement saying you tested it. If my word isn't good enough on that I don't know what is.
All you have been doing is saying I am wrong.

READ my post next time. I didn't cite myself as a reference I posted as a explanation of what I was talking about.





Sitepoint is okay. I have found it to be a pretty good place. It is actually best for site related stuff and is n't necessarily the best seo forum. Actually SeoChat dominates in this area. Prove of this is fairly easy to find. Quite a good percentage of the prominent seo of the industry started and learned what they know from Seochat. Sitepoint doesn't have that reputation. And BTW I am registered there just under a different name. It is one of the few webmaster sites I am not registered under my usual name. The reason for this is related to site investments.





Good for you! Shall I clap? As you said anybody can create a blog and FAQs are much easier than blogs
You seem to be trying to prove to me something. What is it? That your better than me? That your an seo and I am not? So far you have done a great job of running me into the ground. As they say "reputation is built over years but is shattered in seconds" (forgive me for my rendition of it)




Yes I run an seo blog as well as a few other business related sites. I have nothing to prove to you. You want my resume? Goto some of the webmaster forums I frequent. Check it out for yourself. http://forums.seochat.com/member.php?u=19251

Why are you bent on trashing me and my site? Is that fun? If it is by all means go right ahead and have your fun. But please be serious when discussing serious things. Just because you registered in 2003 does not mean you know everything.

I provided a very logical explanation of why they don't matter. In fact I provided multiple points of argument. I'd like to see you counter my arguments. I keep inviting you to and I would really like to see your thoughts on them. They are pretty solid points and I would be impressed by a knowledgeable retort. (This goes for anybody who is following this thread.)

Tested it how? Did you run a truly scientific experiment where you had multiple test and control subjects and you controlled every other factor that might affect rankings? I am fairly certain you have not.

When you say it improved your rankings did you take into account other factors that may have affected your rankings? Did you check to see if you got any new incoming links? Did you make any other changes to the pages? The anchor text alone counts as content and can affect your rankings. Did you consider how the age of the page(s) may have played a role? Did you remove them to see if your rankings dropped when they were removed?

And who do you call prominent? Does prominent mean knowledgeable? Aaron Wall is prominent and almost everything he says is crap. Why is he popular? He's good at marketing. He doesn't have to be good at SEO. He just has to sound good. Another good example are the prominent people who write about the web. They couldn't even begin to build a website but they certainly seem to be able to critique what every one else is doing. Same goes for SEO. Lots of people talking who can't do.

And the prominent SEOers also said .edu and .gov links were more valuable then other links. Those of us who like to think logically and don't have anything to sell refuted that (I can link to the SitePoint where we do that if you'd like). Who was right? Not the prominent SEOers (Google flat out said they are not special). It happens all the time. A good rule of thumb is when it comes to SEO advice is if someone is selling sometihng they are usually not a reliable source of information.

I'm not bent on trashing your site. I made one comment about it early on in this thread and that was it. I'm just bent on trashing a poor theory. The reasoning against it is far stronger then for it. And absolutely no one has been able to prove it helps. Nobody. The reason why most people like to believe it is the same reason why people believe a lot of things with SEO: it's easy to do. It's an easy way out. Adding an external link is easier then creating good content or unique feature so many people want to believe it works.


I joined in 2003 but only to get some flash help. I've only decided to be active here for about the last month. And how long someone has been a member, and post count for that matter, mean nothing. I know members at forums with thousands of posts and every single on is asking for help and usually a problem they could solve with a little bit of thought. I also know members who are brand new to a community and already are great assets.

I also never said I know everything. I just made a solid argument and am awaiting a retort (yes, that's an invitation to respond to my points again). So instead of constantly attacking me personally, which you now have done multiple times, try to attack my points. You don't make a case for yourself by calling me names. That only highlights the weakness in your claims.

Wow! Sorry but you gave nothing logical. Post one piece of logic and I am satisfied. So far you haven't. So far all you have done is read a title to my article and from there built up this silly attitude about it. YOUR MISSING EVERYTHING! I never said that linking out was a new-age theory on ranking in Google overnight. Did I say that? Did I say it replaced building quality content? Never did and quite the contrary had you read my article. What you don't seem to realize is there is value and there is authority.





Yes actually as much as could be I did. It was an isolated page. Again there is no real way to prove this or DISPROVE it because it isn't going to magicly bring you to the top however in my case it did positively effect the page. After removing the links 2 weeks afterward the ranking dropped back to original position. Coincidence? Maybe and that is why I don't claim it to be true. I believe it but it is still a theory. But I have done my research.





Interesting.... yet your little faqs make you a guru? I go by the advice Aaron provides not whether or not he is selling something. Why shouldn't he make a buck? BTW his e-book is the best one out on seo. I judge prominent by the most trusted seo in the industry and by what advice they provide. RandFish(seomoz.org), Aaron Wall(seobook.com) are prominent seo among others. Matt Cutts isn't. His views are biased to the good of Google so the fact that he says .edu have no more value means nothing because Google stands to gain from a statement like that. If he were to admit .edu had more value they would get even more spam. Not to get you started on that one now....


BTW I am not saying your not an seo. I have seen nothing to prove you are however your other advice I have seen is pretty good. However your not adapting to the new google. You lost the jokes site. Maybe I am wrong but could this have been because you lost the rankings? Can't see any other reason as I would have sold the site over letting it crap out.

As for my seo blog. I never publish anything there that I haven't researched enough to be considered fact. If I can't present it as fact it becomes a theory. You following me?

BTW if were following google now then better drop the pr crap because Google says the toolbar PR and the PageRankTM which ranks pages are TWO absolutely different things.

Here are my logical points as I expressed earlier for your convenience.

• No one has proven this to be true even though many have tried.
• PageRank already calculates link value. PageRank is a measure of perceived page quality, if an outgoing link adds to a page's quality it will get more incoming links and thus rank better. If it doesn't add to a page's quality, no bonus will be had. There is absolutely no reason for Google to second guess themselves and add arbitrary blanket bonuses or penalties to all sites because on a perceived notion of a certain attribute always making a site better or worse. So, in short, because Google measures incoming links, they have no need to measure outgoing links, or anything else that supposedly marks a site as having a higher "quality." in the end, if it truly does have a higher quality, it'll get more incoming links naturally.
• Then there is the fact that outgoing links are strictly under the control of the webmaster, like meta tags, and so assigning them any weight leads to the same problems that brought around the downfall of meta tags.
• There are all the thousands or millions of sites and pages that rank perfectly well without any outgoing links. Certain types of sites, such as blogs, normally have outgoing links and it would look abnormal for them not to. However most other site types normally do not have outgoing links and haven't traditionally had them, going back to the 90s, long before Google came about. Most business, commercial, ecommerce, or service sites do not have outgoing links. Not because they're hoarding PR, but because they're trying to sell something and do not want to distract from the user experience or send users away.
• You must not remember a time before incoming link algorithms. In those times to measure quality search engines had to guess based on on-page factors, and it was hard to impossible. The the invention of incoming links, or PageRank, search engines had a perfect way to measure the quality of a site, and so then only had to discern topicality. Why would they take a step backwards and again start using on-page factors to measure quality?
• Google has a lot of smart people working for them, they realize that if external links truly do add to the usefulness of a site then that site is already receiving a bonus because more useful sites garner more incoming links. This is also true for anything else that supposedly adds usefulness. They aren't going to say "Hey, we have this really good algorithm here, but lets second guess it and make an assumption that pages without outgoing links need to be penalized for being less useful." Why would you ever make an assumption about something that you can already discretely measure?
• Also, do not forget, Google itself created the nofollow link attribute to give webmasters an easier way to block links.

Now that I have re-presented my logic please respond accordingly.

You need to get over this. I don't care about your article. I really don't. I'm just arguing that outbound links don't improve your rankings. So please get over the fact that I didn't like your article and let's discuss the merits of outbound links.

I never said anything about how or when outbound links affect rankings. I am flat out saying they do not help in any way. The only way they help is if your users see those links as helpful and link to your page as a result of citing it as a good source. But that is indirect which is not what you are claiming. You are claiming that outbound links help your pages' rankings which is untrue.

You just proven your little experiment was done poorly. One page? You call that an experiment? Did you control the environmental factors that can dirty your results? I know you didn't.

Do you want to run a real experiment? Set up ten pages and put 5 into two separate directories. Number the directories so you don't have to worry about keywords in the URLs spoiling the results. The name the five pages with numbers for similar reasons. Make sure you name them 1.htm - 5.htm in each directory. That way they have the same page names and that is not a factor. Each of the five pages should be of different content but each page should be mirrored in the other directory. Make sure every page uses the same HTML markup. Make sure you target obscure phrases so you can be sure to rank well for them. Then in your test group add external links to "authority" sites. I'd say five links sound good. In your control group add the same text without the hyperlinks. Then link to each page from somewhere in your website and no where else (the links must all be on the same page). Do not tell anyone about these pages. Wait and watch to see how they rank. Monitor it over the course of several months to see if their rankings fluctuate over time. After their rankings seem to level off switch which pages have the outbound links and see if anything changes.

That's how a scientific experiment is done. You have a large sample. One is a control group. One is a test group. All external factors are isolated.

There's nothing wrong with making a buck. But viagra spammers make a fortune sending spam for viagra. That doesn't make them doctors.

That is an opinion. I can have some very successful website publishers (i.e. people who rely on SEO to get their websites to the top so they can make a living) who will tell you he doesn't know jack.

That is a typical paranoid-about-google theory. What's terribley sad about that is in SEO the one thing everyone wants is inside information about the search engines. Especially Google. And here is Matt Cutts giving us that information and you throw it away and call him biased. Do you know what his role is at Google? I bet you don't. He is in charge of their spam group. His team literally modifies their algorithm to help remove crap and spam from the SERPs. That means he knows exactly how the algo works in all of its detail. You can't get a better source of information.

Back to the paranoid part, Matt Cutts and Google have no use for misinformation. They need the opposite. They need webmasters to understand that content is what they are focusing on. One webmasters grasp this they will stop doing stupid things like link farms and seeking .edu links and focus on building quality websites. That makes Google and users happy.

And back to Matt Cutts real quick. To say Aaron Wall and anyone knows more about SEO or offers better advice about ranking in Google then the guy who writes their algorithm is really silly and misguided. Think about it. You really need to think what you consider a quality source of information. You seem to rather trust people who are trying to make money from you over people who actually write the algorithms that affect your rankings.

(FYI, here's good logic about why .edus don't get special treatment)

The new Google? Here is the new Google: they are filtering out trickery and garbage. What's left? Good content. That's why so many wbemasters fail to rank well in Google. They want to take the simple way out. They want tricks and gimmicks (also known as "techniques"). I adapted to the new Google a long time ago. I put high quality unique content on my websites. They get me the high quality incoming links that you can't get otherwise. That's the new Google.

I didn't sell it. I took it down. I refused to monetize it so I couldn't afford to pay for the hosting it needed to support 20,000 visitors a day. What made it so difficult was the poor coding. I actually learned PHP and MySQL on it. Not only did it make it inefficient but it made it hard to move from host to host. In the end, as sad as it was, I just couldn't keep it up and running.

That's fine. In this case I am arguing against your theory. I otherwise don't care about your blog.

Don't ever drop the "PR crap". To understand PR is to understand Google.

I agree with this. Don't use a nofollow...just don't link there AT ALL.

Not sure if anyone has said this, but yahoo and msn ignore nofollow links. So you are still providing or getting link juice on those search engines with nofollows.

There is a debate is to whether or not google ignores them, but they are at least weighted less than regular links.

They both have announced that they will honor it.

Not true. 'nofollow' does not affect the weight given to a link. It only tells the search engines not to follow the link. Additionally, Google definitely does not ignore them as they created them.

What's not true? That there is debate around the question?

I've heard evidence both ways. Just because Google invented nofollow doesn't mean they have to honor it or didn't change their mind about it.

But I don't know either way. Like I said, there is evidence on both sides. I'm just saying it's not a cut-and-dry question.

Yea, everyone says they honor it, but none of them really do.

MSN certainly doesn't honor it, Yahoo sometimes does, and who knows what Google does.

Here's an old post about it anyway...
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728