The blog carnival is a good example. I was think of guest posting too. Not everything is specifically optimizing. Most of it is really about marketing basics. Get your name out there and promote your brand. If you do more of that people start to know who you are and they visit your site. Assuming your content is good they'll link to you.

As more people link to you your site in general does better in search results. More people find you and consequently link to you. The whole thing becomes very self-reinforcing and once it does good content alone might be enough. In the beginning though you need some push marketing so others know who you are.

In retrospect it isn't the networking link itself that's important, it's the site owners and visitors alike who see the link.

Ding, ding, ding. That's exactly it. People look at social media and think how can they get links when instead they should be thinking how can they network with people who will ultimately get them links.

It's still all about the people.

Originally Posted by vangogh

The blog carnival is a good example. I was think of guest posting too. Not everything is specifically optimizing. Most of it is really about marketing basics. Get your name out there and promote your brand. If you do more of that people start to know who you are and they visit your site. Assuming your content is good they'll link to you.

What did you mean by guest posting? (just wanted to hear your perspective on how that affects marketing, or how to convince others to guest blog )

Originally Posted by vangogh

http://In retrospect it isn't th... see the link.

Ding, ding, ding. That's exactly it.

Huh??? Sorry, kind of lost you there

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

it's a scientifically proven fact that StumbleUpon and Digg users are huge fans of Classic TV Shows on DVD, and will visit blogspot.com regularly to read their favourite Beverly Hills 90210 DVD blogs and buy, buy, buy! Never question the TV/DVD Addicts logic. It's sacrilege.

I'm curious, does those Classic TV Fans include this user?
http://walkonmypath.stumbleupon.com/

Or this user?
http://chrishirst.stumbleupon.com/

With guest posting you're just opening yourself up to a new audience. Say your blog has a small audience. You have good content and have created a loyal audience, but only so many people have found you and word of mouth is slow.

If you can post on a popular blog in your industry then your good content is in front of an audience that doesn't necessarily know you, but is made up of people who are likely to enjoy your blog. Write a couple of posts for that other blog and you'll find you have some new subscribers to yours.

Some of my favorite bloggers at the moment are people who I first encountered when they posted on another blog I read. I liked the post and noticed the name. And eventually checked their own blogs.

Think of it this way. On your blog your post gets read by 100 people. On another blog the same post might get read by 10,000 people. That helps you spread your brand, which is perhaps the most important thing anyone could do to market themselves.

Oops. That was me quoting you. I must have messed up the code to make it a quote. It's fixed now. My bad for not checking the post after hitting submit.

I'd just like to say that Chris Hirst is the president and CEO of TV/DVD Addicts, Inc. and not only does he support all of their SEO-related forum tactics, but he actually makes it a requirement. I, on the other hand, have no association with Classic TV/DVD Addiction.

Originally Posted by vangogh

I agree that the actual links on most social bookmarking sites are nofollowed and so not worth what many think when it comes to direct seo. Although not every site uses nofollows and not every search engine pays attention to nofollows. Google claims they do, but I've seen sites rank very well for fairly competitive terms that were only used in nofollow links (mostly blog comments). There are many who question if Google is being completely honest in not following nofollows.

It's the results that matter ... but how would it be in Google's interest to get everyone to use nofollow links to sort out their serps, and then still count those links?

Who says that's why they want everyone using nofollow? I'm not saying it isn't, but just because Google says one thing doesn't necessarily make it true. Maybe they use it only in combination with some other factors.

I generally believe them when it comes to not counting nofollow, but I have noticed a couple of things.

If you have an account with Webmaster Central you'll notice that many of the backlinks Google will show are nofollow links. How could they know the link pointed to your page if they didn't follow the link?

They could certainly find your page through a different link and they could certainly follow a link and not count it for anything, but how could they report it as a backlink without following it at all?

About 6 months ago someone contacted me about some seo work. I didn't end up working on the site, but while looking at it I noticed that it was ranking for one rather competitive phrase. The pages ranking and the site as a whole had very few links. About 95% of the links it did have were spam blog comments on nofollowed pages. All were using the same phrase as anchor text and the home page of the site was ranking for that phrase.

The page did use the text on-page, but this was a fairly competitive phrase, the kind you would expect to need links to rank. Seemed to me the site was ranking in Google almost entirely on the basis of anchor text in nofollowed links.

Granted there could be other reasons for what was going on and for all I know the site is no longer ranking, but it did make me question a little what Google says about not following nofollow.

Again I'm not saying Google does count nofollows in any way and I generally base my seo on the assumption that they don't count or follow those links. But I've seen some things to make me question whether or not Google is being 100% upfront about nofollow.

If I were Google, or any other search engine, I would follow but probably not count the links. Follow could mean a lot of things, though: just read the value of an href attribute? request that url to see what's on the other side, including possible redirects? count it in different types of link analysis? It would be in their interest to know about what's on the other side of that url. It could be, say, the only occurrence on the whole web of some location in Google Maps, and have value in a possible search down the line.

I've heard rumors that nofollow links still help with anchor text, which seems to be the real value being links in Google anyway. I'm not sure whether that's true?

How could they know the link pointed to your page if they didn't follow the link?

Assuming there was no redirect, via the href attribute. Unless I'm missing something obvious here.

Personally, I think the nofollow attribute has to be taken fully into account and the reason is quite simple: it's been around for two years now. If there were any way around it, I'm sure some SEO politicking butt-sucking wannabe would have attempted the very simple experiment required to test it, found a result, posted it, gotten the Sphinn community all up in arms about it, and ended up finding 1000 anti-Google ethical criminal buddies on his side by now.

Or her side. I'm equal-opportunity when it comes to SEO slime.

I think they obviously could know one page links to the next with or without a nofollow applied. But it does require following the link at some point. The nofollow doesn't prevent that, but according to Google they don't follow it at all.

It's like a door connecting two rooms. If the door is closed you have to open it to see what's on the other side. Assuming the door isn't locked you can open it and see, but you still have to open the door.

invent;
>inventory: COMPASS, MAP, KEY, WATER,
turn left;
walk;
use KEY;
open door;

Funny. Maybe Google will invent the keyfollow attribute so you can let them inside your corporate firewall for a ranking boost.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

If there were any way around it, I'm sure some SEO politicking butt-sucking wannabe would have attempted the very simple experiment required to test it, found a result, posted it, gotten the Sphinn community all up in arms about it, and ended up finding 1000 anti-Google ethical criminal buddies on his side by now.

Probably ... unless the person who found a loophole was clever enough to clam up. If you were a criminal, and you found a math flaw in ssl that let you grab everyone's credit card at the coffee shop, would you tell everybody on digital point, or take your secret to the bank?

Steve: as long as you've indexed a url in the past, you can match it up with a nofollowed href. That won't be accurate if there are redirects ... but following a link won't be accurate if there's tricky javascript, either. When I lock my door on the way to work in the morning, I have a pretty good idea what's on the other side. The database gives search engines a less intimate knowledge of what's behind a lot more doors.

as long as you've indexed a url in the past, you can match it up with a nofollowed href.

Doesn't that require following the link?

Maybe it's the way we're defining following a link. To me if you found a nofollow on a link and were honoring nofollows you would just move on. There would be no reason to read the url the link points to. If you read or record the url then you've at least partially followed the link.

It sounds like a language thing ... I would say 'following' a link means actually making an HTTP request to the url described in the link.

From the point of view of the software, to know a link is nofollow, the document has already been shredded into a lot of elements or tags, and the particular anchor has been split out into attributes and their values. Unless a person is exceptionally brave with regular expressions, you've already at least read the href and its url into different parts of memory by the time you know whether it's nofollow'ed or not.

But you're right, in that there's no need to record that the link exists ... that's purely a choice. They must feel it has some type of value.

Social networking sites gives a great initial boost of pages submitted. I have seen some pages I submitted on top 5 of Google SERPs within 2 hours or so. Although they don't get credited by Google for site ranks, helps a great deal introducing the site to new audience.

Forrest I guess it depends then on what Google means by nofollow. I always took it to mean they just ignore the href of the link, but I suppose they don't have to mean it that way.

You're right that they've probably collected the info before the decision is made to follow the link or not. But still if they're matching the link to the URL on the other side they have done a certain amount of following.

If you want to get traffic from Social Bookmarking try
stumbleupon, digg, technorati, squidoo and reddit
those are good sites..

Hi folks.
Can I ask you about following trick?

I have seen a link advertising the BACKLINK exchange.
ad-traffic.net - it looked as really great, maybe to good to be true. It says that they have free system for click-exchange and backlink exchange as well.
I have tried it one month ago and I still don´t see any result. Plus the link is all the same and it is supposed to be rotating.
I do not know whether the problem is low webtraffic on that site (I have just put it on domain names I am not planning to renew) or the service is not working at all.

Sadly enough. It looks as great idea - i would like to have good pagerank while I don´t pay for backlinks. If anybody knows something about it, let me know.Jara

Originally Posted by cheveirtua

Is it true that social networks like Myspace and Social bookmarking service like del.icio.us (did i spell that right?) can help boost your traffic and improve search engine rankings?

Do you use tools to achieve that. If so, could you share some insights...

Originally Posted by Cryxellis

If you want to get traffic from Social Bookmarking try
stumbleupon, digg, technorati, squidoo and reddit
those are good sites..

Sorry, traffic from those sites is basically equivalent to this: