A Waste of Time and Google's U-turn
Posted On: 2009-06-04
Over in Seattle there's a major search engine conference going on and if you want to track what's been happening there you can check out the Twitter stream by using the tag: #smx.
As always there's been plenty of interesting information coming out at the sessions but perhaps the biggest piece of information came in the form of a bombshell dropped by Google's Mr Nice Guy, Matt Cutts. It certainly caught a few people by surprise and actually took the thunder out of the message delivered by at least one of the major speakers at the conference.
A couple of years ago Google announced that it and the other major search engines had introduced the no-follow tag. It was to be placed in links on your website when you were linking out to sites that you didn't have a lot of confidence in. At the time there was much consternation and much confusion among webmasters about this new edict from the gods at Google.
Webmasters were frantically adding no-follow to links on their sites and some even added that dumb tag to internal links. Yes, such was the confusion over that tag that some business sites I have visited have had every internal link within their site fitted up with a no-follow tag. Theoretically that was telling Google that the site owner had no confidence in any page on his own site.
But then life got even more silly when someone suggested that you could increase the value of some pages on your site ... in Google's eyes ... by adding that no-follow tag to internal links on your site that pointed to pages that weren't quite as important as others.
Webmasters began talking about sculpting a site's page rank and that does have a nice ring to it doesn't it? Sculpting page rank ... it makes it sound as though you're doing something almost artistic and beyond the ability of mere mortals. Hell at the Seattle conference one well-known and highly regarded speaker based some of his address to the conference on the importance of sculpting page rank.
Sad times for him and all the others who have busted their nuts trying to sculpt page rank. They should have listened and believed those of us who suggested that sculpting page rank was just another version of the king's new clothes and we were right because Matt Cutts announced at the conference that the no-follow tag is now just about useless and isn't obeyed by the search engine spiders anymore.
Anyone who was doing any testing instead of drinking up the kool aid offered by some of the 'names' in the industry could have told you that long ago. And if you were one of those who thought you could sculpt page rank then it's a shame you didn't listen back then because we were telling anyone who would listen that it was a bunch of BS ... and guess what?
Yesterday Matt Cutts told the people at the conference that all that time webmasters have spent trying to sculpt page rank was just wasted. That's right ... it's been a total waste of time.
As one rather cynical but very savvy webmaster said, the only thing that the no-follow tag has done is shown the world who the webmasters are who blindly follow anything that Google tells them to do.
Google's u-turn
Remember the saga of the paid links? Actually it's an ongoing saga where Google says that it's ok for Google to sell and buy links but God help any mere webmaster who dares to as much as sell or buy one single solitary link in an effort to increase his search engine ranking.
Back when all the paid-links storm blew up Google suggested that if you wanted to sell links it was ok but you had to make it plain to Google's spider that it was a paid link and you weren't trying to game the system by getting a better ranking because of those paid links. Google even said that the best way to ensure that you didn't attract a penalty was to fold the link into some Javascript and everything would be fine because Google's spider couldn't work its way through anything that was in Javascript.
Unfortunately for all those who have wrapped their paid links up in Javascript some news that came out of Google last week is really going to destroy their day. You see, Google announced that it can now read Javascript and has been able to do so for some time so all those paid links that Google couldn't see and couldn't give any importance to are now quite visible and we all know how much Google hates paid links that it can see.
It seems that some people are going to be very busy trying to find some new legitimate way to avoid being penalized by Google for having paid links on their site.
Whoever said that being a webmaster and being interested in search engine optimization was dull and boring?