Do Nofollow Links Count?

Generally we say that nofollow links don’t count, but Ben
Fisher actually found that they do help with ranking based on a small experiment he ran. He did an interesting study where he wrote on the SpiderMan
3 game and then commented on other related blogs that linked back to his SpiderMan 3 post. The unique thing about the link was that it contained the anchor text "piderMan 3" and contained a nofollow, but within a short period of time his site ranked on the first page of Google for piderMan 3 Xbox and other terms.

If you look at the image above it shows that there are 224 results for "piderMan 3 Xbox". This means that it should be fairly easy to rank for the term, but the actual blog post that ranks for the term doesn’t have the word piderMan anywhere within the content. The only reason I think it ranks is because the nofollow link contained the anchor text "piderMan".

I am not sure if the way Google looks at nofollows is currently messed up on their end or if they actually do count them, but based on this experiment it seems that they can help with rankings. What do you think?

New ReviewMe Advertiser Marketplace Now Live!

I am excited to announce a brand new advertiser marketplace to ReviewMe!  In addition to our marketplace of premium
blogs where you can purchase individual reviews, advertisers will now be able to
create campaign offers that approved bloggers will then be able to accept.  This
new advertiser marketplace
gives more control to the advertiser while still giving the blogger 100%
control over what review offers they accept. 

Advertisers get to set up the
information they would like reviewed, the number of reviews they would like to
receive and how much they would like to spend per review.  The minimum review
price is $10.  Advertisers now have the flexibility of purchasing reviews off top blogs individually or creating campaigns for many relevant bloggers to blog
about! 

- note, bloggers that were not
previously accepted into the premium RM marketplace should resubmit their blog
for inclusion into our new Advertiser marketplace. 
Thx!

Post Level TLA’s Now Live!

Readers, we are excited to announce the arrival of Post Level Text Link Ads!  Post Level TLA’s offer many features that our advertisers are looking for including:

• The ability to target highly specific popular blog posts.

• Maximum of one ad below the post.

• Have a full 80 character title and 150 letter description.

• Be positioned directly at the end of top posts making it ideal for click throughs.

• Each ad will be on a single page only.

Check out this page for more information and to browse our marketplace of Post Level TLA’s!

Setting the Tone With Good Comments

The success of content submissions on social media sites is often dictated by the tone of the comments that take place early on. Even if a great piece of content gets a few nasty comments right off the bat it will have a very hard time succeeding and making it to the homepage.

Users often view the first few comments before even clicking through to the content and begin to form their opinion based off of them. If the comments are bad they will automatically assume that the content is bad too, since other members of the community also feel that way.

The problem with this is that some of the social media sites have audiences that are generally very immature. Sometimes even if the content is remarkable someone will come along that doesn’t agree with it and start flaming it in the comments. Others will see this and follow suit and before you know it your submission will be buried into oblivion never to see the light of day again.

If this is something that you notice happening to your submissions then start asking some of your friends on these social sites to read the content and leave positive comments early on. This will help set a positive tone for the submission and keep people from voting your stories down.

On the flipside of this, bad content won’t make the homepage just because there are a bunch of positive comments that have been left. So it’s not a technique that works if you’re trying to spam your horrible content to the homepage.

What has your experience been with the tone set by comments on social media sites?

How Not To Build Links

Over the past few weeks I have attended several conferences including SES NY, AMA Hot Topics and Ad:Tech San Francisco. Throughout each conference I have encountered tons of folks who are
interested in building or buying links, but most of them are going about it the wrong way. Here is what you should not do:

• Same anchor text – if the majority of your incoming text links contain the same anchor text you probably are not going to rank highly for those terms. Search engines are getting more sophisticated and they can usually tell when people are trying to manipulate their search results.
• Home page links – there is nothing wrong with having tons of incoming links to your homepage, but there is something wrong when the rest of your site has no incoming links. This does not look too natural so you should try and increase the number of links to your internal pages.
• Growth – many of us are impatient (including me) which is why we want to grow our links 10 fold within a few days. Usually massive growth of incoming links smells of search manipulation, which is why you should try and grow at a natural pace. Granted you may get a burst of natural links rapidly from social sites like Digg, but if that happens there is really nothing to worry about.
• Cross linking – linking your own sites together if they are related is a good idea if you want to increase each sites traffic, but not search traffic. In most cases all of your sites are probably owned by the same person or hosted on similar C-blocks. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t link your sites together if it makes sense, but don’t do it just to manipulate search results.
• Leveraging forums – one of the easiest ways to get paid links or link exchanges is by posting on forums asking for links. But by doing this you just created a written record that you are looking to build links. This is probably not a good idea, since the last thing you want to do is to give the search engines ammo against you.

There are probably many more things that you should not do when building links, but these are the ones that most people have asked me about at conferences. What other link building tactics should people not do?