Posts Tagged ‘backlinks’

Technorati has released its new Blog Authority ranking. The amount of detail provided by Technorati as to how the authority is really determined is about as deeply secret as the Coca-Cola recipe or which ‘eleven herbs and spices’ are used by KFC. As per many of us Bloggers, I have been interested in determining how the new Technorati authority is calculated as some of my blogs are getting a reasonable score whereas others are deemed as useless by Technorati (and there doesn’t seem logic in the way the authority is calculated, at this time anyway).

Technorati Indexes RSS Feeds

I do however have a theory; I believe that Technorati is using the data in RSS/Atom feeds as its source data. This means that rather than relying on a ‘bot’/spider/web-crawler, Technorati is relying on information fed to it by the likes of a Pub/Sub system such as Google Pubsubhubbub. Google uses RSS/Atom information as processed by Pubsubhubbub so that it is able to provide near real time Search Results. Have you noticed that your Blog posts are indexed by Google very quickly – this is due to the active monitoring of your RSS/Atom feed through Pubsubhubbub.

And why I think that Technorati has gone Pub/Sub…

1. The Technorati Authority is updated frequently (there is no way that Technorati is able to have a ‘bot’ to crawl billions of pages a day as well as process them a few times per day).
2. There is a heavy reliance on recent links and data.
3. Technorati has noted that Blogroll links aren’t included in Authority rankings (RSS/Atom feeds do not include Blogroll links).

Implications of Technorati using RSS/Atom Data

If Technorati is in fact using the Pub/Sub model then there are various implications for SEO in relation to Technorati. Considerations include:

1. The data your Feed contains is what is indexed i.e. if your comments aren’t available via a feed then they won’t be indexed.
2. If you don’t publish/post content frequently then you won’t have content indexed frequently (yes, this is obvious).
3. Trackbacks/Pingbacks won’t be included as an authority measure.
4. Inlinks/Backlinks are more important than ever!!!

I’m pretty sure that Technorati is using the data from RSS/Atom feeds in indexing and determining Blog authority. This may well put more SEO focus on feed content and supports those SEO experts that say that links are still the most important SEO element.

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Part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is getting quality incoming links (also called backlinks and inlinks). Links are not simple to attain! One means of possibly attaining links is to publish articles for reuse through one of the various article publishing Sites /Article Directories. The advantage of using these Directories is that other sites may republish your articles and therefore you’ll attain extra links.

There are many Article Directories however few that offer quality links. Here is a list of the Article Directories with a Google PageRank of PR5 or higher (See my article about the importance of Quality links from Article Directories):

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Heard of the various Article Directories (GoArticles, Article Dashboard, EzineArticles etc.)? Well so have the Search Engines! Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) publicly state that they frown upon duplicate content (the article doesn’t need to constitute plagiarism however no added value is deemed ‘bad’). Article Directories are portals for distributing the same content to multiple websites.

Why Submit content to EzineArticles, GoArticles etc.?

So why do people submit articles to these directories? The primary reason is to attain links from external websites to their (or their customers) Sites. A person writes an article and places hyperlinks in the article to their chosen website. The author then submits the article to one of the Article Directories. The author now has links from the Article Directories to their chosen Sites. The Services then allow for the article to be republished without amendment. Each time the article is republished the authors chosen Sites attain further links.

The Importance of Link Quality

In terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), there are two schools of thought about links; those that believe that any link is a good thing and those who say that quality links are the only effective links and any low quality links are detrimental.

If the first is true, that any link is good, then Article Directories have a valid function.

If the second is true then the value of the Article Directories is limited. High quality Websites do not republish content and the Search Engines are certainly advanced enough to determine that any article with a link back to a directory is duplicate content (and therefore the perceived quality of the article is diminished).

Are Multiple Links Good?

There are two other well known SEO linking limitations relevant to this article; multiple links from the same Website is not as beneficial as many links from many websites (i.e. multiple articles on GoArticles with links to the same website is not necessarily more beneficial than a single link from a single article). The second is that the relevance of the linking site to the destination site is important (e.g. if a Business University links to a Business Consultant Site this is a relevant link). Is an article republishing Site really relevant with the same target audience as for your Site? Probably not.

None of this Matters Anyway as your Article won’t be Republished

The entire argument detailed in this article however may just be in vain! If the objective of submitting articles to the directory is to have content republished then just how often will your article be republished? Likely not often at all (if ever). A very small percentage of articles get republished frequently however the vast majority never get published.

Which Article Service to Use

I have both published to and from (not on this Site) some of the directories. I believe that there is a place however for the good quality Article Directories…

My advice; if you are going to publish to the Article Directories then use one of the high quality ones such as EzineArticles. The rules for submission and republishing are stringent however this means that only better republishers will use your content.

P.S. Don’t Use Rewriting Software

To those people using software to amend original document wording to create a ‘new’ original document … you are wasting your time. The quality of the reproduced articles is terrible and no good quality Website will republish this content.

Incoming search terms for this article:

• ezinearticles site:eckstein id au

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Nofollow is an HTML instruction to Search Engines not to consider the link destination as endorsed by the link originator. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other high quality Search Engines use links as one factor in considering the importance of a Webpage. So, very simplistically, if two WebPages are identical except that one has more incoming links (sometimes called backlinks) than another then the Page with more incoming links will generally appear higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). If the originating Page includes the HTML rel=”nofollow” then the target of the link won’t benefit from the link (in terms of Search Engine ranking).

Why use nofollow?

There are valid uses for the nofollow attribute; say a Blog post refers to spam sites and links to the sites then the Blog won’t want to effectively endorse the spam site and so will include rel=”nofollow” on the link. Wikipedia, for example, includes the nofollow attribute on all external links so that people don’t add a link to Wiki pages purely to attain a link from a high ranked site such as Wikipedia. Blog software such as WordPress by default included the nofollow attribute in all comments so as to avoid blog spamming.

Of course there are two sides to the nofollow story; by Wikipedia, for example, defaulting to nofollow this means that valid links are not given credit (in terms of Search Engine ranking). The nofollow attribute was introduced by Google to assist in determining which were ‘important’ links and which weren’t. Therefore by including nofollow on all links the original objective of nofollow is lost.

Harrys Travel is now dofollow

As part of my SEO experiment I have decided to reverse the WordPress default of nofollow on comments on the Travel Information Website. I have activated the Dofollow WordPress Plugin and included the ‘U Comment I Follow’ image at the end of each post. The idea behind this is that it will be interesting to see if a higher proportion of visitors comment when they are aware that it is a ‘dofollow’ site.

So, as Shakespeare didn’t say ‘to dofollow or to nofollow, that is the question’.

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Almost everyone is affected with email spam. Spam detectors / email filters have improved substantially over the past few years but unfortunately the skills of the spammers have also improved. It is not just businesses involved in the fight against spammers but also governments; The Australian government, for example, is taking spamming and the negative consequences very seriously.

What? Spam isn’t exclusive to Email?

Beyond email there is another very relevant form of spamming; comment and trackback spamming. This form of spamming affects the millions of blogs on the Internet. Most blog posts are open for comments. This means that people are able to comment on the content of the post (look below this post and post a comment if you so wish). Whether using Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, TypePad, Blogger or Read the rest of this entry »

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