Marketing Pilgrim - Latest Comments in Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

press — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:16:32 -0000

It seems that google does follow these links but not sure if they are counted towards page rank. Certainly appear on webmaster tools.

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Or Hillel — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:47:10 -0000

You right! twitter need to place "nofollow" only for people that in the site less than 60 days, al the other without...

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

basmin — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:53:16 -0000

confusing but very informative.
I agree with Tina Langely, this must seem to learn more about the nofollow and dofollow

basmin's last blog post..Tukang Nggame

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Helen Palmer — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:53:22 -0000

Great post and discussion! I think that Google are going to have quite a task keeping up with all the twittering.

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

~e~ — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:54:14 -0000

You made one critical mistake: Google will FOLLOW NOFOLLOW links in order to find the content and index. What it wont do is give that link credit for search engine rankings.

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

PChieng — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:45:27 -0000

It would help out so much if Twitter removed the nofollow tags on links in both the profiles and through the twitterstreams. To help increase one's PR on their profile they would could look at the number of followers vs followees, as well as factor in the number of updates. As far as links in the updates, it makes sense that if a link is popular, people will retweet it and Google will see those links, making the page more relevant.

And if you look at this post about Google needing SEO, you will see that they need to read this post and follow your advice to "breaking down the walled gardens".

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Joost | Internetguerillas — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:19:41 -0000

I have some experience and it is true that pagerank isn't leaked... but other factors like relevancy do get passed on...

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Robyn McMaster — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:48:34 -0000

Hi Andy, I like the way you engage readers by putting opposing views upfront in a way that engages readers. So I have named your blog for a Premio Dardos award. The The Premio Dardos is “bestowed for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing.”

Robyn McMaster's last blog post..Premio Dardos Awards

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

David Bayer — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:20:13 -0000

Andy - interesting post but not technically accurate. GOOGLE'S SPIDERS DO FOLLOW THE NOFOLLOW LIKS ON THE PAGE AND WILL IDNEX THE CONTENT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LINK. You are correct in noting the fact that the nofollow doesn't allow the passing of page rank.

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Marc Beharry — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:44:40 -0000

GREAT FREAKING POST!!! I agree fully and wish i could have chimed in sooner. These freaking retards are destroying the fabric of the internet by screwing with links.

Marc's last blog post..Omar al-Bashir Defies Arrest Warrant Issued by International Criminal Court (ICC)

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Pipe fittings — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:17:13 -0000

If you’ve seen a Google statement that contradicts the above, I’d love to see it.

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Jimmy — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:38:52 -0000

Well, I think it's twitter who needs to remove the nofollow tags from their site, If they are trying to fight spam they should be using some other methods.
Great blog!

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Brent Nau — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 13:24:52 -0000

Andy,

m.twitter.com - all DoFollow links
search.twitter.com - all DoFollow links
RSS feed - all DoFollow links

I think someone referenced it above, majority of third-party API sites use DoFollow links.

So I would say that Twitter is NOT a Black Hole like Wikipedia.

Brent Nau's last blog post..Twitoria - Find Inactive Twitter Friends

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Dana Lookadoo — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:00:13 -0000

Great post and discussion!

Wish Google had a Community Manager who listened and joined the conversation by monitoring and responding to industry-leading blogs, especially discussions like this.

Their Help pages don't always demonstrate what we see spit out into the SERPs. What @Neyne said is often true: The closest to the truth you can get is by saying “in large number of cases Google will do X”.

Dana Lookadoo's last blog post..Hyphens vs. Underscores - Who Wins “Best Keyword Separator?”

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Neyne — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:26:07 -0000

It is a mistake to make a statement that "google will do this" or "google will not do that". The closest to the truth you can get is by saying "in large number of cases google will do X".

I have had pages ranked for a keyword that appeared only in the anchor text of a single, nofollowed link. The story is more complicated than Google's laconic statement.

Neyne's last blog post..My Thoughts on Google’s Webmaster Tools 404 Report

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

jhon — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:08:31 -0000

hi!Nice article I like it .I appreciate this and agreed this.

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

JackHumphrey — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:07:19 -0000

Google not follow a link? I think their statement you quoted above is just a ruse to put off the spammers, which I'm sure it has to a degree. But I've always had serious doubt, to put it mildly, about them not following (literally) nofollow links.

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Skyper — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:47:43 -0000

@Chris,

Agree with you 100%. And this would be the sort of approach that Google woukd take ;-)

.S.

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Chris Tew — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:42:09 -0000

I'm pretty certain that Google still follows nofollow links. They just don't pass PR/authority, but still allow spiders to follow & index, and also pass keyword relevancy.

It simply prevents a site gaining sitewide authority through nofollow links, so that only true editorial links can give a site authority. But nofollow links can still get things indexed and improve rankings as Google accounts for keyword relevancy.

This gives Google the best of both worlds.

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Skyper — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 06:12:15 -0000

@Christoph, could you explain why we are "totally missing it"?

Also, if one *carefully* reads Google's statement above ( http://www.google.com/suppo... ) that "using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web", it becomes clear that crawling, graphing and ranking are seperate issues! Not sure what they *exactly* mean by "dropping target links", but you can only "drop" what has been crawled first :-) And Google does not mention any ranking ("link juice") in the post...

However, the "specific examples of nofollow usage" in Google post clearly shows exmaples of ranking, rather than crawling. Eg. "help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web", "comment spammers", "automatically or manually remove the nofollow attribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions", "prevent paid links from influencing search results" etc.

I think this makes it quite clear what Google does ... (of course they word their statements very carefully to protect their search results quality - which is their #1 competitive factor)

.S. (sorry for the long post)

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Christoph — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 05:48:28 -0000

A very naive article..

You're totally missing the technical point of view.
It's not as easy as simply enabling this, and there is no black/white distinction between all those things.

Fortunately it's easy to mislead people with this, as seen in the comments.

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Tina Langely — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:28:20 -0000

I guess I'm just too new at this to understand all the fuss about "follow" and "no follow." I'm going to have to learn more about it! Do you have a website you can recommend that teaches about this in easy to understand terms?

Tina Langely's last blog post..Broadcasting from your computer

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

Antoine Perdaens — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 16:03:05 -0000

Andy,

May be this is a door wide open for a new kind of search engines. We already see people switching their default firefox search engine to twitter leaving google for occasional search.

We build a new search tool based on the hot links shared on twitter, we call it Tribal Seach and it is a new feature of our MicroPlaza tool, a link aggregator for twitter.

You can try to search for what's hot around search on twitter right now : http://microplaza.com/searc... , you will find interesting results.

@tlg

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

jmacofearth — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:48:01 -0000

Andy,

What about all the Twitter____.com sites starting up daily. Seems that aggregators could get past the "nofollow" fairly easily. There are a lot of nice Twitter Link Gathering tools these days.

Are you concerned about Google not getting the entire story, or Twitter not getting all the love, or the hassle with which those of us who "work" not "game" the system will have to go through to clarify the truth. Cause I think ultimately that's what it's about, "truth."

There will always be gamers entering any system. Just look at the twitter-porn and twitter-spam starting to hit the fan these days. I find some poetic justice that the Auto-Follow and Auto-DM users are the ones getting pegged with the crap followers, but that's just me.

Rock on, and thanks for the information. I'll look to see if I can find someone doing the "follow-no-juice" method of link building and report back. Or you could let me know if I'm on the right track or wacked.

@jmacofearth

John McElhenney's last blog post..Microplaza for Twitter Groups and Tribes - Get'm Goin - Now Follow This!

Re: Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

gestroud — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:29:32 -0000

I guess I need a point clarified before I can form a conclusion on the matter.

If the links were set to "follow," would they show up in Google's index as shortened urls (tinyurl, shorname, etc.), or would they links be translated into the actual page link?

Also, if they aren't restored to their original format, would it create duplicate content?