To follow or "nofollow": How to handle paid links

Last week, I (Karen) posted a link on Facebook about nofollow links and the dangers of not using them. It generated a great deal of confusion and many excellent questions. So, I started doing some additional research into this issue (and indeed it is a hotly debated topic). What I found was that the supporting links in the post I shared were only telling part of the story. 

Background

I started with Wikipedia:

nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element 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.

The original purpose of the rel=”nofollow” attribute was to prevent comment spam. It didn’t (and doesn’t) work perfectly to solve the original issue and there are a host of issues with the attribute - read more about the issues here. 

In 2005, Matt Cutts wrote about Google’s stance on paid links, suggesting that using the nofollow attribute would give search bots the heads up that a link was paid (or not recommended):

But for everyone else, let me talk about why we consider it outside our guidelines to get PageRank via buying links. Google (and pretty much every other major search engine) uses hyperlinks to help determine reputation. Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and link-based analysis has greatly improved the quality of web search. Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. 

So, for 7 years, there has been an ongoing and lengthy debate about whether or not to use nofollow and why. This particular quote [emphasis mine] is probably one that would be considered extremely controversial:

But not everyone agrees it’s up to webmasters to help Google figure out how to rank websites. Romanian search blogger Ionut Alex. Chitu told me that webmasters should put paid links on a separated place on the website, and label them in such a way that users don’t think the webmaster is affiliated with them. Other than that, Ionut argues, “Search engines should be smart enough to detect navigation areas, unrelated links or spam.” When asked on whether he thinks webmasters should use the “nofollow” value, Ionut says, “No, they shouldn’t. Unless they care a lot about search engines. Ideally, webmasters should act as if search engines don’t exist.”

It would be interesting to know what that blogger’s views are five years later.

Endorsement

The nofollow attribute is not exclusively a signal to indicate a paid link. It’s also a flag that a link is not being endorsed by the site hosting the link. Why? Nofollow links receive no SEO benefit. That can be a reason to use them if you have a difference of opinion with the site you’re linking to for any reason.

Not All Search Engines are Equal

I’m not referring to market share. I’m talking about how they treat the nofollow attribute. Here’s a breakdown, courtesy of the Wikipedia article:

rel=”nofollow” Action	Google	Yahoo!	Bing	Ask.com
Uses the link for ranking	No	No	No	?
Follows the link	Yes	Yes	?	No
Indexes the “linked to” page	No	Yes	No	No
Shows the existence of the link	Only previously indexed pages	Yes	Yes	Yes
In results pages for anchor text	Only previously indexed pages	Yes	Only previously indexed pages	Yes

My Conclusion

Originally, my advice was to nofollow any paid link. My view on this has changed, despite the threat of negative action from Google, which appears to be minimal from what I’ve seen so far.

Whether to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute is a grey area. I know of many bloggers who will add any advertiser to their blog to generate revenue. I know of just as many who carefully vet the advertisers they promote for the express purpose of endorsing their business. 

My personal practice going forward will be to use follow/nofollow as an endorsement method. If I want to endorse even a paid advertiser, I will not use the nofollow attribute. For links to sites I don’t endorse, I’ll determine if it’s appropriate to add nofollow to the link or not. 

Do you understand the nofollow attribute better now? Do you need to know more to decide how you’ll decide to use (or not use) it?

The anatomy of a blog post

We’ve been talking about blogging a lot lately because we believe that a blog is one of the most valuable tools a business can use. Here’s a great post from the archives on how to create good, sharable, clickable content for your blog!

*****

I don’t know about you, but I’m a blog post skimmer.  I wish I could promise that every blog post I open gets all of my attention and I take the time to read it all - but I don’t.

Here are some tips on what I find makes a blog post easy to read, skim, and decide if I want to spend more time reading all the words.

1. Clear content

Introduce what you’re going to be talking about and what the goal of the post is.  I did this by introducing the topic by saying I need blog posts to be easy to skim and saying I was going to give tips on what I find works to achieve this.

2. Section headings

If the post is broken down by section headings that jump out at me and give me a feel for the topics in the post, I’ll have a better sense on whether or not the post is hitting points of interest for me. It lets me quickly skim the post to see if it’s what I thought the post was about and whether or not I want to keep reading what the person has to say.

3. Bullet points

• skim-able
• succinct
• don’t require full sentences
• people don’t like to read long paragraphs of text

4. Photos

Photos in a blog post make your post more readable by:

• giving a visual relating to what you’re talking about
• breaking up the text making it more appealing to the eye
• making your posts more clickable

Here’s why: When posting to other sites (like Facebook) it will pull in a few lines of text as well as an accompanying image. It has been proven that having a thumbnail image in a link update increases click thrus.

5. Questions

If you want to make it easy for people to engage, ask a question so they know you want their opinions and input. The more specific and easy to answer the question is, the more likely you are to get a response.

What additional tips would you give for generating good blog posts?

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The single most effective way to maintain a flow of ideas

I love to read. Books and articles, for me, are the key to filling a giant blank journal in my head.

A number of years ago, I was sitting at my desk with a huge book in my hands - I think it was a version of the MS Access Bible. A co-worker walked by and asked me if I liked what I was reading. He happened to be a fairly pompous fellow, so I braced myself and replied that I did like it. Then he asked me if I understood it. (Really?) Yes, I understand it. He seemed amazed and commented that he prefers Shareholder Agreements. I told him I could read those too and he walked away without really commenting.

That Access book and the two or three others I had piled on my desk at that time weren’t the most interesting reading I’ve ever done. Sometimes it took me a few tries before what I needed to do finally worked. But the reading I did gave me so many ideas. It gave me ways to make my projects work better and do more for our office. I was able to glean ideas by reading about functions in those books that I didn’t already know.

I’m still getting ideas from the content that I read, but these days I do the majority of my reading in an RSS reader or Kobo rather than a software brick, er, manual. I’m currently subscribed to 171 blogs, many of which are news blogs and that is how I keep up-to-date with what’s going on in social media, tech and gadgets.

What that means is that I have roughly 3-4,000 posts each week that I flip through to either discard immediately, scan to determine value and discard, or spend a tad more time reading. It’s a lot of reading, but it’s worth it because it’s professional development. I don’t need to know all of it, but I need to know a lot of it.

Essentially, other people’s work gives me inspiration for my own. It generates ideas and thoughts and opinions. I can’t think of a better way to have a continual flow of blog ideas than to read others’ blogs. There is always something you’ll have a comment on or disagree with or support and want to add your own perspective. That’s one of the great advantages of social media - the ability to have discussions that are in-depth on our own time and terms.

So, next time you’re stuck feeling unsure about what to write, go do some reading.

What other strategies do you use to keep ideas flowing? 

Guest posting

Post elsewhere

Something that I try to suggest to my clients is that guest posting for others is a great way to get your name out into the community about your area expertise.

People are often trying to find interesting content for their readers and are happy to have submitted content so I suggest that it never hurts to ask!

Host posts

If you have a blog, you should also consider guest posts because the person who wrote the post generally will also promote the post, bringing their audience to you. It’s a really great two way street!

It’s also, as mentioned above, a great way to bring in fresh content to your blog when it can be hard to keep content coming at a regular pace.

My guest posts

Check our a couple of guest posts I’ve written in the last couple of weeks.  The first is about social media for parents on Peek Inside the Fishbowl, a great Ottawa parenting blog, and the other is on the Smart Spaces blog, run by my friend Heather who runs a business helping people get organized (something *I* definitely could use more of :))

Have you written guest posts?  Do you host them on your blog?

How do you find blog posts to read?

Over the last six months I’ve noticed a topic that has popped into conversations about blog traffic quite a few times and I thought I’d spend a little bit of time talking about it today.

How do you find blog posts to read?

When I first started blogging in 2006 I had a handful of blogs that I read religiously.  I had them all bookmarked and opened them one by one daily to see if there had been any updates.

I was in heaven when I realized there was a way to open every bookmark in a folder at once into multiple tabs, making my job of going to each of these blogs a bit easier.

Then I was introduced to the world of RSS readers and everything changed!

By having a reader I didn’t have to go to blogs that hadn’t been updated, and I would know about a blog that had been updated if I’d gotten tired of waiting for a new post and stopped checking in on them.  It was wonderful.

But then information overload happened.  I was subscribed to literally hundreds of blogs.  And if I missed a few days of going in, the reader told me I had 3,000 posts to read, or something similarly ridiculous.  So I would feel overwhelmed and not read things.  And then I started avoiding my reader completely.

I think  it’s now been about three months since I opened a reader.  That means that all of those blogs I used to read regularly are pretty much forgotten…  ones I really enjoyed reading too!

I now find my content differently.  There are a handful of blogs I’ve gone “old skool” on and have started typing in the url a few times a week to see if there are any updates. There are also a few I’ve signed up for email notifications for, but email notifications and information overload go together really well too!

The rest I go to if I see a link go by on Twitter or Facebook.  That means if you have a blog and you aren’t tweeting and Facebooking the link WHEN I HAPPEN TO BE LOOKING, I am going to miss your blog post.

I wondered if others were feeling the same way and doing the same things so I did a quick and informal Facebook survey.  Here are the results (click on the image to see it more clearly):

By quite a large margin people are finding their blog content by clicking through links.  Some continue to use their RSS readers, and some continue to keep urls bookmarked, but clearly if you aren’t throwing your content in your audience’s face you are missing a key way to get their attention.

This poses a whole other issue though - information overload on Facebook and Twitter.  Content is getting lost there too (especially since Facebook now nests types of posts like Networked blogs and Wordpress).

It will be interesting to see how things evolve because I am sure everything will continue changing. For now, if you’re looking for traffic, I highly recommend finding ways to grab people, because in today’s blog world, you need to stand on the street heckling the crowd to come in instead of waiting for them to happen on by.

How do you get your content out to your audience? What do you find works best?