A long time ago I learned that if I link to some product website from this blog, it will get investigated.

I was contacted by a small business webmaster who wanted to thank me for the link and introduce himself. We chatted, and of course I asked for information from his log files. Sure enough, the initial traffic spike he got was from whois.sc. People investigating his domain. You are all so predictable.

Anyway last month I linked out to a few websites that I appreciate for products, and wondered about two things: would they be interpreted as promotional outlinks, paid or otherwise, and would they be investigated for whatever reason you people tend to look into web sites that get mentioned? I can’t tell the later because I don’t have log access, and I can’t tel the former because rel=nofollow makes no sense at all.

I initially rel=nofollowed the links because I wanted to send the message that no, these were not my sites or my clients and no, I wasn’t trying to boost them from this blog. If I had to use this blog as a source of page rank for real business, I think I’d be in sad shape as an SEO.

When I looked at the post a few days later and saw the rel=nofollow, I thought “they look like paid links marked with the special Google code for paid links”. So I removed the no follows. WTF. This rel-nofollow makes no sense at all.

So Dear Matt Cutts. If I link out to a site that I recommend, do I nofollow? If I don’t nofollow, does it suggest I am boosting them for profit? If I do nofollow the links, does it suggest they were paid links?  Man, I am starting to understand how tuff it must be to be Google these days.

Topical Tags:SEO

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 1:54 pm and is filed under SEO, Competitive Webmastering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.