I thought I was doing a good thing. I appeased the mighty Google god; I listened to Matt Cutts; I made W3C-compliant pages. But Google hates me for listening just as much as they would hate me if I disobeyed all the rules. Either way, what it amounts to is that I can’t try to make a great page or a horrible page.
While I’ve been away a long time, I have not been out of the loop — quite the contrary. I started a search marketing internship and have been learning quite a lot of information from my new bosses. One thing I have found out about the mysterious world of SEO is that I knew a lot more than I thought I did – but oh, do I have a lot to learn.
After diving into this position, eager to learn as much as I could one thing has become abundantly clear: I don’t get Google, and I think that’s their intention. For one thing, let’s start with a concept known as LinkJuice. I’m not sure where the term originates but every time I hear it I flash back to high school and hear Nelly’s “Pimp Juice.” Yeah, I both hate the term and laugh every time I hear it. LinkJuice basically is this weird value that Google and other search engines associate with links to and from other sites. If you have an incoming link from, say, Microsoft.com, the value is quite high and your search engine ranking supposedly improves. However, if you have a link from, say, buycheappills.com, there is no value coming in and it does nothing for you.
Where this becomes controversial is in the concept of paid links. Way back when SEO got started, bad SEOs, or “black hats,” tried to game the system and would exchange links for cash. Google realized this and quickly started to crack down on it. One of the ways this is combated is using “nofollow” which basically removes any of the aforementioned LinkJuice. So, to be a good guy, if you were given money for a link you were supposed to use “nofollow” so that a domain wouldn’t get any juice it tried to pay for. The idea is that it’s supposed to keep the Web honest.
Well great, but now you’re getting into some gray areas. Lisa Barone from Outspoken Media points out that if Apple were to send you a new Mac Book to blog about, that constitutes as a paid link. However, if Mom and Pop bakery is handing out free cupcakes and you tweet or blog about it, it isn’t a paid link. Obviously Mom and Pop don’t intend to get links (or at least for this argument they don’t), but they are giving you product just the same as Apple. So really what Google wants to go after is intent – but how do you measure intent? Moreover, at the Google I/O conference, Google handed out free G1s to attendees who went out and blogged about it or sold it on eBay. Isn’t the LinkJuice and publicity Google got from that paid? As far as I’ve read, there was no “please make every link ‘nofollow’” from Google.
As if to add further confusion about the way Google works, rumors have it that they are considering changing how they value “nofollow.” Currently, if you have three outgoing links on your Web page then each link gets 1/3 of the available LinkJuice. If you use “nofollow” on one, then the remaining two get 1/2 each, and so on. The fear and rumor is that Google is changing it so that no matter what you use “nofollow” on, the LinkJuice doesn’t redistribute. In other words, if you have three sites and one uses “no-follow,” then the two remaining sites would still get 1/3 each instead of getting 1/2. What’s the big deal? Well, if you’re going off the earlier example of paid vs. non-paid links, somebody is getting hosed.
If you go to mom and pop bakery, review their cupcakes and blog about it, they’ll be getting less of the normal share of LinkJuice and a portion of your LinkJuice goes into thin air. It effectively demerits the authority of your site. It’s confusing because it’s my understanding of “nofollow” that it was supposed to allow Webmasters to give the most applicable share to content generated sans fees or gain by the author, basically “honest content.”
The past few weeks of research and work combined with the few events that have or might take place have left me wondering exactly what the heck is the whole idea behind this game. It’s been said by Seth Godin that your content is your SEO, and that is certainly true. An SEO shouldn’t be trying to game Google and scam the system but Google does ask you to do a few things to provide clean honest content – and then ignores it and treats all SEOs like they are evil. Leading me to ask: What the Google?
