What is SEO?

When you are actively seeking links for your site, you will find that not everyone is quite as open and honest as they could be.

If someone has linked to your site out of the goodness of their heart, there is not a lot you can complain about it if it is not a ‘genuine’ link. But if you are entering into link exchanges, or you are buying links, you need to know that you are getting what you agreed to.

What is meant by a genuine link? Usually this would be a link on a page that is indexed in google (and MSN and Yahoo), and without the rel=nofollow attribute being part of the link.

If you are not familiar with rel=nofollow you should be! It is HTML code used within the definition of a link, that tells the search engines to ignore the link (not to follow it) and hence not to pass page rank or search engine benefits from the link.

This blog entry was prompted by someone who submitted a site to my niche travel directory, where either payment or a reciprocal link is required. All looked fine, and I approved the link. But later, I started wondering why the home page of the site had PR5 and the links page had PR0. This wasn’t a big issue for me - it was a good and relevant site for my visitors, which is of more use than high PR - but it seemed a bit unexpected.

The resources page didn’t look like a brand new addition to the site (which would have explained its PR0). The link wasn’t nofollow, but a little investigation showed that the link from the home page to the links page was itself nofollow - hence google and other search engines that look at the nofollow command would have never found the page.

I removed the link concerned from my directory and sent them an email explaining why. I was tempted to also contact the other people on the site’s links page, but decided it was not for me to play the role of internet policeman! But the issue is, how to avoid the situation arising.

Checking the source code of pages containing your links is possible, and easy, in both Firefox and IE, but it is time-consuming. So instead I use a very useful tool called SEO for firefox which, among other things, shows every nofollow link on a page in bright red. I use this all the time, and it works very effectively. The same tool also checks the page rank and number of inbound links that your competitors have when you do a search, and is highly recommended.

So why didn’t this work for me in the situation above? Because the nofollow command was on the page that linked to the resources page, not on the page itself. If I had also checked that the page itself was indexed in google, I would have found that it wasn’t - the whole page was excluded.

Pages can be missing from the google index for a variety of reasons, including commands in the robots.txt file; nofollow commands; being too many clicks from the home page to be found (or simply not being linked to from anywhere else on the site - a common occurrence); being a new page; being part of a banned site. I daresay there are other methods to hide a page for the more technically able.

None of these make a page an especially attractive place for your link to be. So my suggestion is that for all important links you check both the nofollow status of the link itself, and that the page is indexed.

A new page in a site will usually be indexed within a few days, so that is rarely a problem, except for links in brand new directories where the owner often launches the site before the site is indexed.

There is one last thing to check - hover your mouse over the link and see the link text that appears at the bottom of the screen. This should be your website address. But sometimes it will be a more convoluted PHP type link e.g. www.yourdomain.com/link.php?xyz=abc.htm, sometimes it will be a reference to javascript code, and other times perhaps no link shows at all.

All of these will open your site when clicked on, but these are all situations to be concerned about. PHP links are usually followed if they are not too complicated, but likely to be a less satisfactory link than a straight text link - the more complicated the URL, the less likely that a search engine will follow it. Javascript links are not followed and hidden or unclear links may be completely innocent but may hide a multitude of problems.

If in doubt, ask that a real valid text link be used or don’t enter into the agreement - nobody uses nofollow accidentally!