Relnofollow is a cool hyperlink attribute. In the SEO world, we say relnofollow as if it’s a legit word that Webster’s should know about. No, it’s not in the dictionary yet, because there’s an equals sign and some quotation marks in the real version of relnofollow that make relnofollow actual HTML code. It normally looks like this:

rel=”nofollow”

Here’s the actual HTML with the correct relnofollow hyperlink attribute usage:

<a href="http://www.seo.com" rel="nofollow">No follow link</a>

When referring to it, we don’t say rel equals quotation mark no follow quotation mark. That would be completely fatuous. If you haven’t guessed, I’m going to be talking about relnofollow and how it relates to your SEO success, so listen up.

First, there’s good ways and stupid ways to use relnofollow. We’ll discuss the good ways in detail, and mention a few bad ways, because you shouldn’t be doing those unless you’re a knucklehead who likes to commit SEO suicide.

In conversations about relnofollow, you will often hear mention of pagerank, or PR as SEOs affectionately refer to it. Pagerank has become an important attribute of overall SEO health, and matters quite a bit when thinking about why the heck we use relnofollow in the first place.

Over time, and through effective on- and off-page search engine optimization, you achieve pagerank, which is Google’s way of declaring how important your site is, or how much authority it has in their index. Pagerank, in Google, is pretty important and shouldn’t be ignored.

Relnofollow allows you to carefully manage and distribute your pagerank across pages of your site, and also the sites that you link to. It allows your search engine indexing to be clean and powerful.

How Does RelNoFollow work?

Quite simply, it tells the search engine spiders to not follow a particular link and to not pass link authority or pagerank to the page that the link points to. If you have pages with many links, you can use relnofollow so that you don’t pass pagerank and you don’t pass authority. Nofollow is critical in managing your sites pagerank and in keeping your site’s SEO attributes clean. By maintaining a high pagerank, and by nofollowing links to shady or semi-shady sites, you can better maintain SEO trust and authority which is critical for search engine success.

Back in 2005, Google started paying attention to relnofollow. You can find this quote on the official Google blog:

“From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.”

Google initially made this move in response to the comment spam that was hammering bloggers. Commenting was the new and improved way to get “unlimited” links. People who wanted  links for their site would post comments on random blogs, most of them worthless, and put the anchor text they want to rank for as their name, which is made into a link to their site in most blogging platforms. They would also stuff the comment with links. Google tested out a new tag, which became relnofollow, to combat the spammers. They have suggested the use of relnofollow anywhere that users can post their own links. Since then, there have been many other helpful uses for relnofollow.

Pagerank is passed through links. Incoming links with good authority provide pagerank. Each page of your site has its own pagerank so you can end up with different pageranks throughout your site. Similarly, your outgoing links provide pagerank for other pages of other sites. You may or may not want to pass pagerank to other sites, and you may or may not want to pass pagerank to other pages on your site. Herein lies the uber secret of relnofollow…

Here’s how pagerank is divvied up. If your home page has a page rank of 5 and you have 5 outgoing links, no matter if they point to internal pages of your site or to external pages of other sites, each link will pass 1 point of pagerank to the page that receives that link. Hypothetically, the page that receives that link would gain a pagerank of one. Pagerank affects where Google places your site in the search engine results pages (SERPS). You should focus on passing pagerank to pages that you want to rank well.

NOTE: If you have too many links pointing to other pages the amount of pagerank you pass is limited. If you have a pagerank of 5 and you have 50 outgoing links, each link is worth less pagerank, in this case just one tenth of a rank.

What are some common uses for the rel=”nofollow” tag?

1. The most common use of relnofollow is to nofollow blog comments. Most blogging platforms do this by default, and you have to either have a plugin or manually change the link attributes to allow blog comment links to be followed.
2. You probably don’t want to pass pagerank to your privacy policy, terms of service, or disclaimers. Who cares if those rank for anything, ever. Add a simple relnofollow attribute to the hyperlink and you won’t have to worry about spreading your pagerank where it shouldn’t be spread.
3. A lot of advertisers choose to nofollow the ads that they display on their sites. This way, the sites the ads point to don’t steal pagerank and authority.
4. On the blacker side of SEO, some webmasters may use relnofollow to cheat out reciprocal link partners (if you do that, I promise it will come back to haunt you). They will perform a link trade. After the link has been verified, they’ll nofollow the link to the unsuspecting webmaster’s site. That way they don’t pass pagerank but they get pagerank from the weaseled webmaster.

Rel=”nofollow” is critical to your site’s SEO health and should be used accordingly. Remember, you want your site to look natural to the search engines, so even with this useful tag, use it wisely and with moderation.

Hooking Up Your Hyperlink Rel and Not Following It is a post by SEO expert Seth Ellsworth. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I’m going to go way out here. I’m going way out on the weakest, most rotted out extremity of the nearest and most treacherous tree limb and make a blatant assumption. Here it is…

If you’re reading this, which neither of us can dispute the fact that you are, I’ll bet my salary on the fact that you’ve heard of at least one of these behemoths of social media.

• Facebook – Ain’t just for young kids. The largest growth on Facebook is from 30+ year old patrons and 50 million people in 35 languages use it almost every day. Wow. Facebook is killing MySpace, and not softly. (Oops. I wasn’t going to mention MySpace because I wanted you to connect the dots. MySpace was the pioneer in social media so naturally MySpace belongs in this list of social media giants. Even though it deserves a mention, I’ll leave them MySpace “unbulleted” in this bulleted list.
• YouTube – Nielsen Online estimates that Youtube serves over 32% of the videos watched online. I guarantee you’ve laughed at a video from YouTube. Inescapable.
• Twitter – The incredibly popular micro-blogging platform grew at 752% growth last year. You must get on Twitter. This is one of the best ways to listen to and follow the pulse of your industry.
• StumbleUpon It’s just what you do when you stumble across something cool. (My personal favorite for social bookmarking. If I find some content I enjoy, I can bookmark it using StumbleUpon so that everyone can enjoy it).
• iTunes Podcasts – Even Apple has joined “social media.”
• LinkedIn – Business networking powerhouse.
• Squidoo – Community of content sharing “lenses” created by the Social Media, Permission Marketing Master Mogul himself, Mr. Seth Godin.
• Blogger – Google’s baby. The most popular and user-friendly hosted blogging platform.

If you haven’t heard of any of these mega-sites it’s safe to assume that you have no business reading this blog post either. I’d also guess that if you’ve never heard of them you don’t use a computer (which is impossible), haven’t turned on your computer (impossible), don’t watch television (almost impossible), or you don’t have teenage kids (very possible). So what is this fad? It’s called Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0?

With technical geek speak aside, Web 2.0 is synonymous with social media. For our purposes, it’s that simple.

The sites I mentioned above are just a few sites that make up a major part of the new generation in internet user experience. Social media is made up of online social communities built around an interactive, conversational delivery and sharing of all things media. Social media is about content.

Just how popular is Web 2.0? Here’s a stat offered by Dave Rosenberg over at CNet: social networks and blogs are MORE popular than email.

“He’s kidding, right?”

No, he’s not.

Why You MUST Be Using Social Media

If you aren’t utilizing social media in your marketing (called social marketing or social networking) you’re leaving mounds of cash on the table. Why? Social media is FREE to use and the absolutely best way to create raving fans of your brand or product.

Is your business struggling? Hit social media and you won’t strain your budget. Is your business already successful? Use social media to bury your competition so deep they won’t be able to get out. There are just no excuses not to use social media. If you’re not using it, your competitors will. Just do it.

People spend more time in social media than ever and the amount of time they spend sharing stuff, and chatting, and posting, and commenting increases by the hour.

The social media landscape just gets better and better and better and better. New social sites are popping up all over the place. What’s more is that supplementary sister sites with software and programs to help you use the behemoth social media sites are showing up more and more. For example, Twitter users have new tools that are published to help them generate more Tweeps (Twitter followers) and analyze their Twitter traffic and statistics and even allow for incredible search capabilities (how you keep up on your industry). There are almost two dozen of these programs that I’m aware of. These useful tools help to eliminate any excuse you have for not getting involved in social media. All these tools allow you to automate and analyze some social networking tasks. Even more evidence that you just can’t ignore social media.

Social media allows for you to brand your business, share media, generate traffic, presell new customers (without actually selling anything), create relationships, monitor the pulse of your industry— and do it all for FREE. You can’t beat that. Social media is the kind of thing that your bottom line loves.

Start with Facebook and Twitter. As of today, these are the two pillars. Set up a LinkedIn profile next. Steadily build your profile and your exposure will increase. Honestly, you won’t find a subject that isn’t been worked over in social media. Just jump in and get involved in the conversation that’s already taking place in your industry. We’ll talk next about social media rules that will help you do social media right.

Basic Rules of Social Media:

• Be real. Be genuine. Be yourself. Social Media is not about selling stuff. It’s about communicating with others. If you “promote” yourself you’ll get hammered and it will ruin your brand. Social media is a lot like high school where everyone will start talking about you, whether for good or bad.
• Most important Rule of Thumb: Add indisputable value to the conversation. Nobody likes people who are always selling stuff. By adding value to a conversation people will seek you out in large numbers and look to you for answers. The biggest way to add value is to give away free stuff and to TEACH. People will begin to see you as an expert.
• Transparency is the social media protocol. Transparency has never been easier to recognize than it is now. It can absolutely catapult your business or rip it apart. If you are real and genuine, people can see you for who you really are in social media. If you’re fake, you can’t hide. So don’t be fake. If you’re real, let people in to your life (Don’t worry, you’re in control of what they do and don’t see about your life). You’re literally bringing thousands of people in to your world through social media so let them pull up a chair, sit in your parlor and chill with you for a minute.
• Use real names and profiles. Unless you’re branding your business, use real usernames and real profiles that don’t sound promotional. People are wary of salesmen. Don’t be salesy.

That should get you pointed in the right direction. Now go set up a Facebook account for yourself and a Facebook Fan page for your business and put a link to that on your site. Sign up for Twitter, study Twitter, and go kill it. Put a link to your Twitter profile on your site as well.

Any questions, concerns, or rude comments?

Post your comments below.

Web Two Point What? is a post by SEO expert Seth Ellsworth. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If you haven’t heard of Mr. Robots, don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t even on the SEO map till just a couple years ago. Most of you, however, know what it is but don’t know exactly how to dominate the robots.

Robots.txt files are no secret. You can spy on literally anyone’s robots file by simply typing “www.domain.com/robots.txt.” The robots.txt should always and only be in the root of the domain and EVERY website should have one, even if it’s generic and I’ll tell you why.

There’s mixed communication about the robots. Use it. Don’t use it. Use meta-robots. You could have also heard advice to abandon the robots.txt all together. Who is right?

Here’s the secret sauce. Check it out.

First things first, understand that the robots.txt file was not designed for human usage. It was designed to command search ‘bots’ about how exactly they can behave on your site. It sets parameters that the bots have to obey and mandates what information they can and cannot access.

This is critical for your sites SEO success. You don’t want the bots looking through your dirty closets, so to speak.

What is a Robots.txt File?

The robots.txt is nothing more than a simple text file that should always sit in the root directory of your site. Once you understand the proper formats it’s a piece of cake to create. This system is called the Robots Exclusion Standard.

Always be sure to create the file in a basic text editor like Notepad or TextEdit and NOT in an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or FrontPage. That’s critically important. The robots.txt is NOT an html file and is not even remotely close to any web language. It has its own format that is completely different than any other language out there. Lucky for us, it’s extremely simple once you know how to use it.

Robots.txt Breakdown

The robots file is simple. It consists of two main directives: User-agent and Disallow.

User Agent
Every item in the robots.txt file is specified by what is called a ‘user agent.’ The user agent line specifies the robot that the command refers to.

Example:

User-agent: googlebot

On the user agent line you can also use what is called a ‘wildcard character’ that specifies ALL robots at once.

Example:

User-agent: *

If you don’t know what the user agent names are, you can easily find these in your own site logs by checking for requests to the robots.txt file. The cool thing is that most major search engines have names for their spiders. Like pet names. I’m not kidding. Slurp.

Here some major bots:

Googlebot
Yahoo! Slurp
MSNbot
Teoma
Mediapartners-Google (Google AdSense Robot)
Xenu Link Sleuth

Disallow
The second most important part of your robots.txt file is the ‘disallow’ directive line which is usually written right below the user agent. Remember, just because the disallow directive is present does not mean that the specified bots are completely disallowed from your site, you can pick and choose what they can and can’t index or download.

The disallow directives can specify files and directories.

For example, if you want to instruct ALL spiders to not download your privacy policy, you would enter:

User-agent: *
Disallow: privacy.html

You can also specify entire directories with a directive like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Again, if you only want a certain bot to be disallowed from a file or directory, put its name in place of the *.

This will block spiders from your cgi-bin directory.

Super Ninja Robots.txt Trick

Security is a huge issue online. Naturally, some webmasters are nervous about listing the directories that they want to keep private thinking that they’ll be handing the hackers and black-hat-ness-doers a roadmap to their most secret stuff.

But we’re smarter than that aren’t we?

Here’s what you do: If the directory you want to exclude or block is “secret” all you need to do is abbreviate it and add an asterisk to the end. You’ll want to make sure that the abbreviation is unique. You can name the directory you want protected ‘/secretsizzlesauce/’ and you’ll just add this line to your robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /sec*

Problem solved.

This directive will disallow spiders from indexing directories that begin with “sec.” You’ll want to double check your directory structure to make sure you won’t be disallowing any other directories that you wouldn’t want disallowed. For example, this directive would disallow the directory “secondary” if you had that directory on your server.

To make things easier, just as the user agent directive, there is a similar wildcard command for the disallow directive. If you were to disallow /tos then by default it will disallow files with ‘tos‘  such as a tos.html as well as any file inside the /tos directory such as /tos/terms.html.

Important Tactics For Robot Domination

• Always place your robots in the root directory of your site so that it can be accessed like this: www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt
• If you leave the disallow line blank, it indicates that ALL files may be retrieved.

  User-agent:*
  Disallow:

• You can add as many disallow directives to a single user agent as you need to but all user agents must have a disallow directive whether the directive disallows or not.
• To be SEO kosher, at least one disallow line must be present for every user agent directive. You don’t want the bots to misread your stuff, so be sure and get it right. If you don’t get the format right they may just ignore the entire file and that is not cool. Most people who have their stuff indexed when they don’t want it to be indexed have syntax errors in their robots.
• Use the Analyze Robots.txt tool in your Google Webmaster Account to make sure you set up your robots file correctly.
• An empty robots is the exact same as not having one at all. So, if nothing else, use at least the basic directive to allow the entire site.
• How to add comments to a robots? To add comments into your robots, all you need to do is throw a # in front and that entire line will be ignored. DO NOT put comments on the end of a directive line.  That is bad form and some bots may not read it correctly.
• What stuff do you want to disallow in your robots?
  • Any folder that you don’t want the public eye to find or those that aren’t password protected that should be.
  • Printer friendly versions of pages (mostly to avoid the duplicate content filter).
  • Image directory to protect them from leeches and to make your content more spiderable.
  • CGI-BIN which houses some of the programming code on your site.
  • Find bots in your site logs that are sucking up bandwidth and not returning any value

Killer Robot Tactics

• This set up allows the bots to visit everything on your site and sometimes on your server, so use carefully. The * specifies ALL robots and the open disallow directive applies no restrictions to ANY bot.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

• This set up prevents your entire site from being indexed or downloaded. In theory, this will keep ALL bots out.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

• This set up keeps out just one bot. In this case, we’re denying the heck out of Ask’s bot, Teoma.

User-agent: Teoma
Disallow: /

• This set up keeps ALL bots out of your cgi-bin and your image directory:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/

• If you want to disallow Google from indexing your images in their image search engine but allow all other bots, do this:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/

• If you create a page that is perfect for Yahoo!, but you don’t want Google to see it:

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /yahoo-page.html
#don’t use user agents or robots.txt for cloaking. That’s SEO suicide.

If You Don’t Use a Robots.txt File…

A well written robots.txt file helps your site get indexed up to 15% deeper for most sites. It also allows you to control your content so that your site’s SEO footprint is clean and indexable and literal fodder for search engines. That, is worth the effort.

Everyone should have and employ a solid robots.txt file. It is critical to the long term success of your site.

Get it done.

Bling.

Killer Robots From Outer SEO Space: How to Dominate the Robots.txt File is a post by SEO expert Seth Ellsworth. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Disappointed? Yeah. Threw me into my low-mid-life crisis. We should have held a memorial for baseball as we knew it.

I remember the years when baseball was a man’s sport, not a cheaters sport. I loved it. I couldn’t miss a Mariner’s game rain or shine…more rain than shine, but the King Dome ruled. I was there to watch Griffey’s rookie season, the Jr. and Sr. tandem, his first Grand Slam and A-Rod’s inaugural homerun. Jay Buhner, Pete O’Brien, Dave Valle, Harold Reynolds, Tino Martinez, Omar Vizquel, The Big Unit…all ancient memories now. We’re talking stone-age ancient, or so it seems.

When the recent news came out about Alex Rodriguez, I was broken for a day. Extremely disappointed. Literally every last one of my hopes for baseball’s future was finally strung out to fade in the sun on an unreachable limb of shame.

How does baseball bounce back from having its icon player completely, publicly wamboozled? Who knows. Alas, we’re not here to talk about the MLB and roids. Thankfully.

Something Profound Amidst the Muck

And what else is there to do than apply the A-Fraud stuff to SEO? Yup, we can apply what A-Rod is going through to SEO. It’s brilliant, check it out.

A-Fraud broke the cardinal rule of SEO, and, well, of life too. Though steroids weren’t in the day to day conversation back then, he marginalized his personal brand integrity and partook of ‘grey area’ stuff when the consequences of taking it weren’t even considered. Steroids was part of the ‘loosey goosey’ era in baseball where players, coaches and trainers just looked the other way and let it happen (I would have considered it flat out cheating, but, to be fair, it actually was a grey area back then. It baffles me as to why but that’s just how it was).

Every day at SEO.com we come across webmasters that have doomed their business to SEO failure. They’re doing the exact same thing that A-Rod did, but to their businesses. They marginalize their site’s integrity by partaking in grey area, loosey-goosey stuff without concern for future consequences. They pump the juice to get some cool short term results without a thought for future ailments that may come of it. Bad idea. Very bad idea.

When you have an all-seeing and omniscient powerhouse like Google looming over you, as a webmaster, you can’t hide under ‘ignorance’ like A-Rod did for so many years. Google doesn’t care who you are. They know everyone and are everywhere, watching you. Kinda creepy. More creepy knowing they control your web business, at least the free traffic part of it. So you HAVE to make them happy. You have no choice. They are no respecter of persons [or websites]. They will find you and they will dump your site as if it didn’t even exist. And search engine placement resurrection is a difficult, lengthy process.

Avoid Grey-ness Like You Would Steroids

Using A-Rod as an example of what happens when you go the grey hat route, you get hammered when the sun exposes the true colors or when the market/boss changes expectations. In other words, once Google finds out or changes policies (and they will) you get hammered. Once the U.S. found out about her golden boy baller’s ugly, old, stale grey stuff, golden boy got hammered. Wouldn’t A-Rod have been better to steer clear of anything that could be considered cheating? Duh. Your business is no different.

For your main site, things that are considered ‘grey hat’ should be avoided completely. It’s not worth the long term repercussions. It just isn’t. Build your site right the first time. Keep as far from the ledge as possible and you’ll be loved by Google and you’ll find a place in your niche’s Google hall of fame. Good luck A-Rod.

For long term sustainability, steady and white hat will win the race. Don’t go for the ‘quick’ score.

What is Grey Hat?

Here’s the legit definition so bookmark this page or tweet it to your friends because this is good:

Grey hat SEO is the employment of techniques that are not technically against Google’s policies but that don’t provide value and are done solely for SEO purposes without regard for user experience.

Here’s the kicker. Pay attention. Grey hat today can literally become black hat tomorrow.

I’ve seen grey turn to black too many times. Here’s an example: Remember when blog commenting was the craze about 18 months ago? Everyone came out with their own software to almost automate blog spamming because it was cool. An immediate billion anchor text links!

All of a sudden, Google laid the smack down and it hurt. Blog spamming will kill you now. That’s not to say you can’t comment on a blog and point to your site, but you have to actually make a real comment and join the conversation.

***Don’t risk sandboxing your brand for the latest SEO craze. Be real all the time***

What Are Grey Hat Techniques?

Before we lay out the common grey hat mojo, know that there are literally unlimited grey hat areas. When building SEO focus on adding value and user experience and you will win, always. Period. Limit the things that you do that are ONLY for SEO purposes. Remember, grey hat today can be black hat tomorrow morning so pick your battles wisely. Don’t blow it like A-Rod did.

These are a few grey-hat tactics that could be just as bad for your site in the long run as steroids were to A-Rod:

• Stuffing keywords in alt tags, link titles and image titles.
• Linking to sites that have nothing to do with your niche or industry.
• Obtaining inbound links that have nothing to do with your niche or industry.
• Purchasing links under the guise of ‘advertising’ or ‘traffic purposes’ when they are really for SEO.
• Social media spam.
• Blog comment spamming is now black hat.

Have you committed the grey hat A-Rod steroid sin? Repent. Do you have anything to add to the grey hat areas that we’ve gone over?

Bling.

What Does Alex Rodriguez Have to Do With SEO? is a post by SEO expert Seth Ellsworth. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.