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Blind Five Year Old

SEO, SEM, Marketing and Technology sprinkled with Sports, Parenting and Rants

Nofollow Change is about UsabilityJune 29

The SEO community was thrown into a tizzy by the announcement at SMX Advanced that Google had changed the way it dealt with nofollow links. The details were a bit fuzzy. Conjecture ran amok. Was nofollow page sculpting dead, or just crippled?

Nofollow page sculpting is dead

A post by Matt Cutts cleared up any confusion.

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

The days in which you could hoard page rank or authority on a few links by nofollowing others is a thing of the past. (In fact, has been in the past for over a year!)

Instead, the page rank or authority on nofollow links is lost, falling into the equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.

SEOmoz wrote up a great piece that illustrated this point and detailed ways in which you can continue to page sculpt without the use of nofollow. Though doing so might not be wise. Read on to find out why.

Nofollow change outrage

Many in the SEO industry became irate. They shouted and stomped their feet, decrying the whimsy of Google, who in 2005 introduced the nofollow concept, nurtured it (to a point) and changed the rules without notice.

The changing nature of SEO is what keeps most agencies, consultants and talking heads in business. If the algorithms were transparent and had been perfected then no one would need our services.

The truth is that the algorithms are a work in progress. Search Engines are like blind five year olds and, as such, are still learning. If you’re a parent, you know that as soon as you figure out how to deal with one problem your kid has moved on and given you another one to solve.

I mean, really, are you still grousing about how meta keywords are no longer important?

So why did Google make this change? Well, it wasn’t to target specific people or sites. And it wasn’t malicious or to make your life miserable. The truth is that the nofollow change is about usability and Google’s continuing efforts to make the web more useful for people.

Nofollow change is about usability

The problem with nofollow was that it didn’t allow the search engine to look at the page like a human being. If you nofollowed 20 links out of 25 on a page you were essentially telling Google that only 5 links existed.

But to a human being, all 25 links exist.

The fact that you were telling Google that those 5 links were what mattered most isn’t how a human being would interpret that page. This made Google unhappy.

Nofollow Design Guidelines

Yes, Google does have design and content guidelines.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

The nofollow change essentially means that they’re counting your nofollow links against that 100 link benchmark. Translation. Stop putting so many links on a page!

Many at Google point to Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice as a favorite in the Google Tech Talk series.

Friend Is a Four Letter WordJune 22

Technology now provides a level of connection that was unheard of just a scant twenty years ago. The cell phone, the Internet and the marriage of the two in smart phones (BlackBerry, iPhone etc.) have rapidly increased our ability to stay in touch. But who are we staying in touch with exactly? Do we have the time for all these people, and do we short-change family in the process?

Friend Is a Four Letter Word

Automated report emails from work, status updates from Facebook friends you never really talk to and follower notifications that often wind up being spam consistently interrupt your weekend like a toddler tugging at the edge of your shirt.

Don’t get me wrong, there are times when getting an important email while you’re on the go can make a real difference. But most of the time it could have waited until the next day, never mind another hour.

More and more we’re getting messages from online friends: Facebook updates, Twitter followers and FriendFeed subscribers. I get a lot out of my social network, which is nearly all on FriendFeed. There are a slew of people I now count as friends through my FriendFeed experience.

Yet, should I be using my time to chat with them when I could be spending more time with

Search Engines are Readers TooJune 11

Last week David Risley wrote a blog post for Search Engine Journal that recommended that you forget all about SEO and write for readers, not search engines. His advice borders on dangerous, in part because some of it is accurate.

My recommendation is to write posts designed to help, provoke or inspire your reader.

That’s great advice. However, his definition of a reader is far too narrow.

Search Engines are Readers Too

Future readers are searching for your content. They’re typing queries into Google right now. The search engine has read your blog and come to some conclusions about when and where to show your content.

SEO is about making it easy for the search engine to come to the right conclusions. It’s about ensuring that the content you write is displayed for the right searches.

Search engines are the gate keepers to the more than 15 billion searches performed in the US every month. They are powerful but they are not smart.

Welcome to Kindergarten

Bling Search EngineJune 4

Bling Search Engine

Since the launch of Microsoft’s Bing I’ve received traffic from ‘bling’ keywords: bling search engine, bling paid search, bling search real time.

Search is funny that way. A small misspelling by the user is matched to a variant of my blog name. The one letter difference between blind and bling seems big to a person but doesn’t amount to much for a search engine. It’s yet another example of my blind five year old theory on search engines.

I don’t know, maybe they should have named it Bling.

Bling is catchy and has an established vernacular. They could have used all sorts of celebrity endorsements about needing to find their bling. I can see the tag line.

“Search for your Bling!”

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11 Ways to Spot a Bad SEO FirmJune 2

There are a lot of bad SEO firms and consultants out there that make it more difficult for SEO to become a recognized and valuable part of every business.

I recently conducted a search for a SEO Manager at Caring.com and was bombarded with pitches from SEO firms and consultants. Based on this experience and some research I’ve come up with a list.

11 Ways to Spot a Bad SEO Firm

Rank Promise

Any SEO firm that promises you a number one ranking for any term before doing any keyword research or competitive analysis should be avoided.

Instant Results

SEO isn’t about what you can do in 30 days but a long-term plan to match your content with user queries. That’s not to say that progress won’t be made in the short-term, but beware of the get results fast pitch.

Network of Quality Links

A number of firms will claim that they have a “network of quality sites” that enable them to drive links back to your site. In general, these networks aren’t of such high quality and are often the target of web spam teams. Quality linkbuilding isn’t as easy as turning on a switch. It takes time and that’s why the links are valuable.

Submissions Bonanza

“We’ll submit you to over 500 sea