Agents of Value

Written by Ric, images by Ian Zeroing in on something interesting to write about is the most tricky part of writing a blog article. So I embarked on my journey to the wilderness called “forums” to find something to ponder about. If in the arts we have recurring themes, SEO forums also have a lot of recurring topics. After hours of digging around, I decided to write something about nofollow links. The dofollow-nofollow “debate” These are the two types of links – nofollow and dofollow. The difference between these two is that nofollow links have a nofollow tag while dofollow links don’t have it. The nofollow tag was introduced by Google in 2005. It came about as a result of there being more and more online sites which depended on user generated content. If the owner of a site wasn’t able to review every single link that was published on a site – it would quickly become overrun with link spam. By marking a link as ‘no follow’ it tells the search engines that the [...]

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Since this March, lots of webmasters have been complaining about massive drops in traffic as a result of the recent ranking updates by Google. The Blogosphere is filled with reports of sites seeing drops in traffic of 40% or more. The thing to keep in mind through all of this is that, there has not been any drop in the number of people going online, searching for information. Nor has Google decided to just stop returning results. Even for the most silly searches, good old Google is going to pump out the 10 best results it can find in it’s index. The fact that traffic dropped on some websites, has more to do with the perceived quality, authenticity, and interestingness of the content on that website, than any other factor. Fortunately, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow made a blog post, where he provided some insight into the way Google is trying to evaluate and rank website content. Some of the ideas are really just common sense, but they may require a change of thinking, if [...]

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