Loren Baker writes today on the damage you can do your site by applying the “nofollow” microformat to your own pages. He breaks it down to one core element: what are you saying if you don’t trust your own pages?
Using nofollow on yourself seems to be one pretty obvious way of sending the wrong signals — it may or may not be directly read as a “bad thing,” but it absolutely suggests something manipulative or untrustworthy about your site.
By using a NoFollow attribute to link to these [about, contact, privacy, etc.] pages, you’re basically telling Google that you do not trust yourself, you are not real, and you do not honor user privacy. Hence, the drop in ranking.
Loren Baker
There are plenty of ways you can leverage search engines. Why make use of a tactic which obviously sends a message of manipulation? It seems pretty straightforward to me: your code should reflect your intentions. Nofollow suggests that you don’t have faith in a page; that you don’t actually WANT to help people find it. If you’re using it to point to your own contact page, you are effectively saying that you don’t WANT to be contacted. (Or maybe you just don’t trust that lousy contact form you’re using?)
You have little chance of making your business a success if you are unwilling to trust yourself. You may not have intended to send that message; but it is definitely one signal which can be picked up from the use of nofollow.
The idea behind using nofollow on your own pages was, I believe, to focus attention on your other pages: your content bearing, keyword rich pages. It’s the myth of “conserving PageRank” — I don’t know where it started, but it’s been talked about many times. This particular idea about nofollow is described by one publication as follows:
The other side of the nofollow tag, is that you can take advantage of it inside your own web sites. Think about all the low value, or no money pages on your site… pages like about us, where to find us, contact us. Every link leaving your home page “bleeds” PageRank to those pages and you’ll want to stop that!
Instead of using normal static hyperlinks you can use nofollow links instead. This lets the “human mouse clicking visitor” find the pages on their own, but totally blocks the search engine from finding them.
So not only can you provide visitors with a rich user experience, you can conserve your PageRank and link popularity within your home page.
“Bleeds PageRank,” eh? Simple point: PageRank doesn’t “leak.” If you link out to a page, that page gains a small portion of your PR — that portion is not, however, subtracted from your page’s rank. Even if PageRank were a meaningful metric, this argument would be patently absurd. (And I’m not getting into that argument right now….)
Every page on your site is important. Do you think that your “About Us” page isn’t significant because it doesn’t have any products listed on it? It’s not a call to action? Well, think again. You’re not just selling your product: you’re also selling trust in your company. People will buy from a company which they think will deliver on their promises. These “no money” pages convey important information to give your potential customers faith in your company. Don’t try and sell them short.
Everybody seems to be writing about Twitter. I can’t decide whether it’s so big because people think it’s cute, because people think it has marketing potential, or because it’s just so popular that they want to jump on the bandwagon. Nonetheless, it seems like I’m reading something about Twitter just about every day. The Twitter “micro-blogging” phenomenon is pretty intense.
I can certainly see that it has a huge potential for marketing spontaneity: if your target market is the shopping spree/spontaneous spender type, you may have a winning possibility with Twitter. Woot! has jumped on board, and I think it’s probably got fantastic potential for them. I’m less certain how valuable it may be for others…
The characteristics Woot! has which make Twitter so useful?
- Very short term of availability. If you want to Woot, you need to know what’s up NOW.
- Very technological market segment — Woot sells a lot to gadget geeks. Twitter ALSO appeals to gadget geeks. Match made in heaven.
- Woot appeals to a sense of immediacy: if you make a decision quickly, you can get a great deal. Twitter appeals to the same sense of immediacy in human interaction, by keeping constantly updated about the activities of your Twitter friends.
There are definitely other companies who could benefit from Twitter — any business which makes heavy use of limited time offers, limited inventory sales, or daily featured items could probably make use of Twitter fairly effectively.
Outside of these? I’ve got my doubts. However, with the amount of attention it’s currently receiving in the blogosphere (and the search marketing blogosphere in particular,) it seems likely that we’ll see it applied in numerous creative manners in the near future.
It’s worth watching, at any rate. There’s no question that there will be plenty of very unique applications coming from Twitter.
Jill Whalen has a nice article at SearchEngineLand on duplicate content. Although I don’t necessarily have anything to add to the article, I think I can summarize it pretty nicely:
What Search Engines DON’T do about Duplicate Content
Search engine spider to website:
“Hi! It looks like you’ve got two copies of the same document here! Well, humph. I’m not going to index EITHER of them and I’m going to dock your rankings while I’m at it!”
What Search Engines DO about Duplicate Content
Search engine spider to website:
“Hi! It looks like you’ve got two copies of the same document here! Well, it looks like this one is the more original, so I’m just going to try and index it. I might get confused, though, and sometimes try and serve up results for the other page.”
This applies to any duplicated documents — whether it’s multiple addresses for a document on your own site or a document which appears on several different websites. The search engine wants to pick one copy to point people towards, and they’ll try and pick whichever is most original.
The “penalty” that you’ll see is actually the fact that a) some copies of the page may be missing, b) search engines may not pick the version of the page which you want them to, and c) if you’re syndicating material, they might pick a copy on somebody else’s website. The fact that an off-site copy gets picked up ahead of yours isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, since that copy may be on a site with more authority and still drive traffic and reputation to you.
So, there it is. Duplicate content in a nutshell.