This post might be a bit more technical than usual, but it serves several purposes. First, it showcases an example of some of the technical things we keep up on in our effort to give our clients top search engine placement. Second, it shows how our competitors sometimes miss the boat. Third it has some practical implications for how you should build your own website and how you should seek links on other sites.

Recently, a Google employee named Matt Cutts posted on the rel="nofollow" attribute. In technical terms, adding this text to a link tells searh engines, "I’m providing this link without actually endorsing the content behind it." Why does this matter? Because every page on the web gets a different amount of voting power. You can think of this voting power as being a scale from 10-100. This voting power roughly corresponds to Google’s page rank (1-10). In simple terms, every link on the page passes a fraction of the voting power. So if you have a new page with a page rank of 1 (=10 points of voting power) and you have only 5 links on the page, each of those pages is fed 2 points (.2 pagerank).

Initially, the idea of the nofollow attribute was to stem the flow of pagerank and focus it where webmasters wanted. So if of those 5 links, i put a nofollow tag in 3, then the 2 remaining links would get 5 points of voting power instead of the previous 2. However, this power was abused by webmasters, so Google changed it so that nofollow links do not get counted, but the power of those links is not redistributed. So in the previous example, according to Google’s current algorithm the 2 remaining pages still only get 2 points, the other 3 pages get no points, and 6 points of voting power remain uncast.

The Implications

1. Posting links in blogs and other settings where they are tagged with the nofollow attribute will not help you increase web trafficfrom search engines. Just the other day I read another search engine optimizers blog where he suggested that followed links were preferable but not essential. However, such links will still bring you traffic from the poeple who actually click on it.

2. While having nofollow tags on your own site may deter spammers, a more undesirable consequence is that it reduces your overall voting power. A better strategy in my opinion would be to actively participate in spam and trackback approval and disapprove content that is truly spam, while letting your vote be counted for the sites you do link to.

So hopefully this knowledge will help you decide what communities to participate in from a link building standpoint, and how to build your own communities to maximize your voice and influence on the web.