The Nofollow Link & Social Media
23
2008
There has been a lot of questions about how Social Media is affecting the SEO industry. The question I would like to ask is how can it help the SEO industry and how will affect the SEO for my clients sites and my own. The major issue with Social Media sites and how they play a role in your SEO these days is a majority of them (especially the big boys e.g. Twitter) use the Nofollow link. “Well your asking what does this mean and why do I need to worry about it.” First of all don’t worry about it, this is not the end of the world but what it means is that going to all these major social media and networking sites and linking back to your website will for the most part have no affect on your search engine results.
The NoFollow link (e.g. <a href=”url” rel=”nofollow”>) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, this was due to the very high amount of blog comment spamming. The wonderful Wikipedia definition says, “nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.”
With Social Media sites popping up daily and with them being very easy to place user generated content and links spammers began the same old routine and therefore we suffer from their actions. The top social media and networking sites quickly found that they too needed to use the nofollow attribute to help reduce the amount of spam submitted. So for the most part placing a link on Social Media sites will not directly help your search engine optimization efforts. That doesn’t mean Social Media can not help in gaining valuable links to your sites here are a couple of ways Social Media and Networking help:
- Ask for links to your site from those people you are networking with
- Social Media is a great Link Baiting tool
- Create instant awareness of your website or blog posts making it easier for people to find and therefore link to
So these are just a few tips and examples of how you can use Social Media and Networking site to help gain valuable links back to your website for SEO purposes. Although the majority of these social sites we use daily will not directly help our site SEO here are a list of some that can:
Social sites that allow Dofollow links in the profile area
1. Digg
2. Propeller
3. Flickr
4. Kirtsy
5. LinkedIn
6. Current
7. PostonFire
8. BloggingZoom
9. CoRank
10. Technorati
11. MyBlogLog
12. Bumpzee
13. LinkaGoGo
14. Bibsonomy
15. Mister-Wong
16. MyLinkVault
17. ClipClip
18. 9Rules
19. AssociatedContent
20. Blogoria
21. NowPublic
22. MemeStreams
List from Jeff Quipp at SearchEnginePeople.com
Current Top 20 Social Bookmarking sites that Dofollow
1. Blinklist.com
2. Furl.net
3. Mister-wong.com
4. Backflip.com
5. Spurl.net
6. Diigo.com
7. Bibsonomy.org
8. Rawsugar.com
9. Linkagogo.com
10. Myjeeves.ask.com
11. Buddy Marks
12. Connectedy
13. MyLinkVault
14. Jumptags.com
15. OYAX
16. A1 Webmarks
17. Bookmark Tracker
18. myVmarks
19. Health Ranker
20. Yattle
(Note this may change at any time!)
The wonderful thing about these social sites is that we can create our own user generated content on them and leverage the power and authority they have in the search engines. If we write and share valuable and useful content within these sites such as Hubpages.com, Squidoo.com, Digg.com, Wordpress.com, and many more, our content will rank very high in the search engines giving us wonderful exposure to the masses hopefully creating buzz and therefore more sales.
So with all this in mind we need to remember that SEO and Social Media are two different channels that we can and should use to build successful businesses online and brand ourselves or our products. We need to use both of them to stay competitive in this ever changing online world.
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Tags: Dofollow, Link Baiting, Links, Nofollow, Social Media, Social Networking, tool
August 23rd, 2008 at 11:35 am
Good information thanks for offering it to the public at large I will have to explore each of those links further in the days to come.
@Knatchwas last blog post..Internet Censorship … Should it happen?
August 26th, 2008 at 3:28 am
To be very true, i am using these social media sites extensively. My basic purpose is to fetch the traffic rather than backlinks or PR. I think traffic is much much important than PR. If some of your site or post will be on first page of DIGG, Can you imagine that what you would be going to get? It will be almost unbelievable.
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May 29th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
The nofollow link dose prevent page rank liking but from my experience it effects ranking. Maybe less then dofollow but it sure dose. Some of my sites got indexed by nofollow links and that made me do some more research…