Did you see Search Engine Watch remove links to sources on an article about websites scared of outbound links?
-
I saw this over on reddit and was curious if anyone else saw this article and noticed the same thing?
http://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/38jgro/sew_quotes_me_and_others_on_a_topic_about_sites/
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2411268/the-collateral-damage-of-google-s-link-policy
The irony here is pretty great. Thoughts on this?
-
SEW is under new ownership. I submitted a post a couple of weeks ago for my monthly column and the majority of the links in my post were nofollowed by SEW. I wrote to the new editor to ask why and they reviewed the links and decided the the one that I had included that linked to my own site did contribute to the conversation well, so they removed the nofollow. I had also mentioned Alan Bleiweiss in my article and out of courtesy, linked to his site. (It bugs me when people mention someone and then link to their Twitter profile...if they're good enough to mention, why not give them a link?) They would not remove the nofollow on that link.
I think that publications like Search Engine Watch, Moz and other high quality sites that accept user generated content have to be really careful about how they link out. Personally, if SEW told me that all of my links would now be nofollowed, I'd likely keep publishing there as I do get business as a result of my articles. But, I am guessing that there are quite a few authors that would stop submitting articles to them.
I think this is a case where a few bad apples spoil the lot. I bet you the new editors reviewed some article submissions and saw that people were using SEW as a platform to link out. If SEW got an outbound link penalty that would not be good...so they might have gone a little over to the side of caution in making nofollow decisions. With that said, it looks like they have now edited the article you quoted to go ahead and allow followed links. I also checked a few other articles and didn't see any excessive nofollowing so maybe they've loosened up a little.
-
Yeah, I saw this - it's a bit ... sad and ironic that SEW would say Google's link policy was "doing damage" and then say "we can't link to you because of our company policy about links."
SE Watch was most definitely irony-impaired on this one.
-
I asked John Mueller at Google a while ago about a news article my company wrote, should my links be dofollow or nofollow, he replied if they have been requested or in exchange for something then it should be nofollow. WHAT! Its a news article that was 100% researched by our team and nobody we link to would even know about it until the article came out and EVEN if they did how the hell would they even know unless there was some sort of visual exchange in someway! I didn't UNDERSTAND the response then and I still DON'T now. If this is a their response and I know 100% that we did our own research how can I trust that anyone looking at the news article from Google will see it the same way and if not then say its seems like someone would have paid for that so we are going to punish you for it. SO despite the article not having any influence or paid links or anything of that sort I still decided to nofollow the links. Google screwed me before on false pretenses and I am sure they will do it again. Mathematically it all leads back to Adwords in some way or another.
Google's flaw has always been the same, don't reveal anything and wait for the spammers who are actively looking for ranking factors to find them way before legit businesses understand them, by this time its exploited by everyone and the cycle starts again!
If ranking factors are a sign of what Google thinks a Good company should demonstrate then why the hell don't they tell people. This way legit business owners will rank up top for their services and be competing with others in their industry instead of competing with spammers and affiliate sites that only exists because of the reasons mentioned in the paragraph above.
Sick of this crap from Google. Same cycle for 15+ years. When will they learn.
They WILL NOT be able to build an algo/system that simply responds to genuine sites. So they might as well train business how to market themselves better. The better the real companies do the harder it will be for blackhat SEO's to enter the market.
They also need to respond immediately to spam issues not wait 6 months to factor them into a new algo. Nip the churn and burns in the bud and they will die a quick death forever!
How can so many bright minds at Google produce such poor decisions. They never think of the consequences of their actions.
Their thoughtless actions and poor response times have led to an astonishing amount of damage.
Forums have been trashed because of link profile building, Google should have discounted that immediately. It would have saved hundreds of thousands of site owners agony and in some cases irreversible damage. The success of this led to people in Asia being hired to decipher captcha codes every few seconds leading people to KILL themselves because of their jobs.
Google has a strong part to play in their DEATHS! This is just the tip of the iceberg.
YES you can't blame a gun maker for a gun owners actions but you can blame them for irresponsible distribution of those guns or poor reactions to issues with those guns. Same thing applies to links and the also to content for Google. The amount of spun garbage out there because Google desires content amounts to unfathomable amounts of garbage content flooding the web. Think of the webservers holding all this garbage and everything surrounding it. The global impact alone of all the energy needed for every aspect of that content, from being crawled and indexed, space required, loading of the content X billions of pages its shocking and probably has a notable impact on climate change.
A company this size needs to take better care before they make ANY decisions.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How can I secure my website?
Hi, I hope you are doing well. I wanted to ask you how I secure my website whenever I have SLL but how can I make more secure my website? I hope I will like anyone's reply. thanks in advance This is my website: https://www.myqurantutor.com/
SEO Learn Center | | Bigbrand1 -
SEO for business owners course link?
Hi, something I saw a few weeks back.. something Rand was doing titled something like 'SEO for business owners'? Could someone be so kind as to post the link (I'm sure i didn't imagine this!) Thanks 🙂
SEO Learn Center | | GregDixson0 -
Have Semantic Search and Hummingbird questions? Don't miss Tuesday's free Mozinar.
Hey Q&A friends, I know a lot of you have questions about semantic search and Google's Hummingbird, so for this Tuesday's free Mozinar (10/21), we're having the amazing Gianluca Fiorelli on to teach you and answer all your questions. You can register for free here: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/468375870 We do record all these webinars, so if you can't make it, you'll be able to find it in our past webinars within 48 hours post-Mozinar. See you there! B0IrjznCMAMEDR7.png
SEO Learn Center | | EricaMcGillivray2 -
Need Definitive Source on Wordpress SEO
I am a longtime practitioner of classic asp. I build sites with SEO built-in and administer largely to sites I have built. I have, up til now, had a policy of not working (SEO) on Wordpress projects because - I don't presently build Wordpress sites Am unfamiliar with how SEO could be implemented on CMS I have a long time client who wants me to do contract SEO work on various Wordpress sites on his servers. Can someone point me to a definitive source on the latest methods for Wordpress SEO. I am very proficient in SEO with conventional web sites - I just need to know how to implement it in Wordpress. I don't see how plug-ins can implement serious SEO, but my mind is open.
SEO Learn Center | | dcmike0 -
Many competitors are doing spam report as well as spam link building for my website. Could you suggest me that how can I resolve this issue?
Many competitors are doing spam report as well as spam link building for my website. Due to spam links my website's ranking has been going down. Could you suggest me that how can I resolve this issue? Regards,
SEO Learn Center | | GSM
Mak0 -
Long copy/articles vs short copy/articles
Hi i'm after data which shows having long articles (e.g. 3000 words) outperforms a much shorter article like 1000 words (assume they are both the same quality of articles) for SEO and even conversion. So far i have seen these articles. http://moz.com/blog/why-content-goes-viral-the-scientific-theory-and-proof including the PDF which links to it. http://moz.com/blog/what-kind-of-content-gets-links-in-2012 Can anyone recommend any other sources which backs the claim that long articles are normally better than short articles. Cheers, Matt
SEO Learn Center | | Mattcarter080 -
Machine Learning - Randomness in Search Engine Ranking Algorithms
I believe, sometimes you may 'deserve' the first position, but get #3. And of course, sometimes you may deserve #3 and instead be #1. All due to a 'randomness factor' in search engine algorithms. I've been holding this hypothesis for quite sometime. Really, it started when I learned about SEOmoz using machine learning to better investigate SEO best practices. I suddenly found myself wanting to learn more about machine learning, and the implications of using it for SEO. I'm by no means able to utilize machine learning myself, but I it appears unsupervised learning would have a real chance of cracking search engine algorithms. Hey, even Stuxnet was cracked! Surely Google/ Bing would know (and account for) this, right? We can agree they'd obviously prefer a highly skilled mathematician not be able to crack the code. Therefore, I'm led to believe that search engines use some sort of randomness in their rankings. Maybe not much. Perhaps not all the time. But if a random percentage of search results, had a random variable of sorts included in their calculations... wouldn't that be enough to prevent the vast majority of cracking attempts? Thoughts, opinions, criticism? Thanks.
SEO Learn Center | | DonnieCooper0 -
Websites copying my content and spamming it on 15+ different domains- WHY?? More pop up as I try to take each one down- what do they gain from this?
I own http://TheCareerProject.org and in the last 3 months over 15 sites have popped up copying my content and Google is scanning it as my own. Why would a site do this? Is it a hacker campaign to take away rankings? What benefits do they get from this. EXAMPLE1 : http://germanbollati.com/heat-victor-hugo-juarez-puebla/, EXAMPLE 2: http://rsa-dev1.com/unbalanced-underwriting-outsourcing-india/ There are 15 more I have submitted to Google Webmaster to evaluate and I contact the site owners and majority do not respond. Why are they doing this and what can I do? Thank you - Alicia- info@thecareerproject.org
SEO Learn Center | | miller4280