slimster.net » SEO http://www.slimster.net People, Technology, Gardens, Yoga and Corporate America Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:36:02 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 No Follow and Internal Links http://www.slimster.net/no-follow-and-internal-links/ http://www.slimster.net/no-follow-and-internal-links/#comments Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:13:40 +0000 Slim http://www.slimster.net/?p=221 When the whole “page rank sculpting” thing was a hot topic and all the new, up-and-coming SEO’s were no-following all of their client’s internal links, I was suspicious. I wasn’t suspicious just because I’m paranoid. I was suspicious because of WHY the no follow attribute was created in the first place.

The no follow tag was created so that comment spam and a whole host of link-dropping activities could be minimized in terms of how those links affected search rankings. People were building scripts to comment in blog posts and those comments were full of links that passed PageRank. Google hates that kind of stuff so they pushed the no follow attribute and the world signed on.

So, the no follow attribute was created to combat spam and indicate that links to a website are not necessarily trusted.

Google likes trust.

A lot of people got wise to the fact that putting no follow tags on internal pages condensed the flow of pageRank to pages that were critical to their rankings. This was a flaw in the Google algorithm that was addressed. In the meantime, some SEOs were telling their clients to add no follow tags to their “about us” pages and “privacy” pages. For a time it worked. But to me, adding a no follow tag to an “about us” page told search engines that our about page could not be trusted.

Google likes trust.

So yesterday Matt Cutts posted a video explaining that adding no follow to internal hyperlinks was really just a bad idea. Thanks Matt. I have argued that point many times. Here’s the video:

]]> http://www.slimster.net/no-follow-and-internal-links/feed/ 0 How To Get Delisted From Google http://www.slimster.net/how-to-get-delisted-from-google/ http://www.slimster.net/how-to-get-delisted-from-google/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:38:35 +0000 Slim http://www.slimster.net/how-to-get-delisted-from-google/ Do you have a website and you’re sick and tired of getting hits and traffic? Are your servers over-worked? Do you have the need to be removed from Google and other imposing search engines? Don’t fret. I have the perfect 2-step solution that is guaranteed to satisfy your need for peace and tranquility.

Step 1: Go to notepad and create a file and name it robots.txt. Put 2 lines of code in that file:
line 1: User-agent: *
line 2: Disallow: /
It should look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Be sure and use the “/” in your disallow statement or this won’t work! Diligence, my friends.

Step 2: Even though Step 1 should be quite effective, redundancy ensures that you will succeed in protecting your servers from intruding requests. In step two, include the following meta tag in each of your web pages:

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”

This is your “backup plan”. Don’t confuse yourself and use “index, follow” as that might tell search crawlers to access your content which could cause unnecessary computations on your server due to unwanted site visitors.

Now, sit back and relax. Hear that? Yes, my friends, that’s silence. Sweet sweet silence. You might say that’s just deja-vu all over again.

]]> http://www.slimster.net/how-to-get-delisted-from-google/feed/ 0