Linkedin adds rel=”nofollow” to profile links – SEO News
For some time now, there has been a lot of custom anchor text and SEO strategies for having juice from a linkedin profile pointing to your sites. There is a couple of blog posts out there that described methods of obtaining high PR on your profile.
Quietly and without much news on the SEO front, Linkedin rolled out this update to the disdain of quite a few webmasters. To be honest I don’t get the reasoning behind the nofollow tag. We all know it was implemented during a time when every spam bot on the planet was dropping 5 link comments on blogs.
However times have changed. Almost every blog has the nofollow tag applied to comment links. Commenting on blogs is way down as a result. It is no longer beneficial to a web property to have incoming links from blog comments. In all actuality the nofollow tag is in some ways possibly hindering communication and the fostering of ideas among fellow bloggers.
The other issue with applying the nofollow tag is that it is like a red flag to the search engines. Kind of like covering your tracks about where you are linking to. Hey here’s a link but I don’t trust it. Links are votes in Google’s algorithm. We all know that the one with the higher number of natural, quality votes wins the popularity contest.
Google wants to make sure that webmasters are not chasing after Page Rank. They want the web to grow and conform to a set of disciplines that means a better quality of search results for all. Since there are so many dishonest webmasters trying to game the system, tags like nofollow are created to combat the mess created by spam, ultimately making the job of legitimate webmasters more difficult.
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I accidentally wrote hmassive comment to this post, but sent it as an SEO quote!!! Dam it!
To sum up my view:
- Google has further proved how important links are for rankings by hounding large websites to convert to nofollow.
- Twitter and FB did the same, after being hounded by Google.
- But where are webmaster supposed to get link juice from these days? Now everybody uses twitter to share information, people are less likely to blog about a post by and link to your site! The introduction of “bit.ly” links simply sucks up link juice by getting in between the landing site and twitter.
Link building has morphed again! Goodbye link baiting………….