I didn’t realise it until lately, but there’s been a bug in the blog that’s stopped you from adding comments. This was due to the Enmask Captcha system which i installed to try and stop the 100 or so(no doubt) scrape box or xrumer auto generated spam comments that flood the system each day.
Everything is fixed now so as the poster says… Keep calm and carry on.
Removing rel=nofollow and linking out to other websites is good for your SEO.
For a few years now I’ve been proud to be known as a dofollow blog. And so long as my visitors don’t abuse the trust I place in them by commenting with spammy names, I’m pretty happy to link out to anything except porn pills and poker.
In my posts I try to link as much as possible however to date, I’ve been reluctant to link using keyword rich anchors to pages on 3rd party websites for fear of being too generous. To this end you might have noticed a lot of my external links use the anchors ‘here’ or ‘take a look’.
Over the past month I tried an experiment and switched off my dofollow plugin for WordPress, making all links from the site nofollowed like most default installations of WordPress.
I haven’t changed much of anything else and left the changes to be indexed. To my astonishment, my site plummeted from 4th to 8th for my chosen keyword. Confident that the site had been fully re-indexed, I turned my dofollow plugin back on and reinstated dofollow links throughout my site.
The net result is that once again my website has risen through the search engines to a prominent place.
The up-shot of this research is that by using the default nofollowed state for all links on your blog and its comments you are in fact holding back your website and reducing its ability to rank.
I’s further like to highlight that most of my comments link to sites of unrelated topics so make of that what you will.
Happy dofollowing.
Many SEO companies operate a content network to bolster their clients links and drive additional ambient revenue. These are a great way of building authority within a subject and can result in some really great links that you control and that cannot be duplicated by a competitor. Some SEO agencies even adopt this as their majority link building practice (I’m looking at you Smart Traffic), building site after site and populating it with content.
But ther in lies the problem. How do you maintain high quality content across a wide range of subjects without repeating the same topics and how can this content be of-the-moment?
I had a really interesting meeting this week with the owner of Flux Magazine, a fashion/music site who wanted tips on how to improve their revenue. I casually mentioned that we ran a number of fashion blogs with a view to these becoming authority sites in the long run and that getting original content for them was proving difficult as our editorial team simply ran out of steam from time to time.
She looked puzzled and replied “We get all our content, images and videos supplied by the brands PR companies”.
Needless to say a massive penny dropped.
Not only can you get great text content, but also highly topical and even pre-release notification of events leading to your site being completely fresh and on the ball…. awesome! Plus you get to piggy back on the reputation of the brands you mention which should yield to a better long tail, improved ads and click throughs on your affiliate links.
So the very next day I sat the team down and tasked them with contacting key industry PR companies asking to be put on their mailing list for news about the brands the represent. What’s more, from past experience. I know many PR companies will go the extra mile and actually write unique content just for you as opposed to simply sending out the same old press releases you have to re-write.
As a side note this has prompted me to develop Gabriel Hounds, an online PR division which im trialling the PageLines wordpress CMS on… keep checking back for updates.
I’d like to say a big thanks to the Alltop.com team who have graciously accepted markrushworth.com onto their most excellent news resource. To be fair i’ve been pestering them for some time and think i might finally have worn them down. The flip side is that someone out there obviously thinks this site is worth reading which is just the type of encouragement I need to persevere with this shenannigans.
Joking aside i use alltop.com every day, not only is their seo chanel brilliant, but you should check their social media pages (social-media.alltop.com) which is a great second perspective on this still emerging activity.
long live markrushworth.com, long live seo.alltop.com
The new SEOBook.com design is now live (at least ive just noticed it) and i have to say im impressed. Gone is the jumbo header and in comes a more considered design that is inline with contemporary blogging – good work Aaron & Co.
You still have to login to make comments however i have noticed a new (?) menu item in the account admin panel where you can write about yourself and drop in a dofollow link back to your money site.
Nice!
Please be patient while i work through the optimisation and design teaks to the excellent ColourBold wordpress theme by Site5 which i have chosen as my blog theme for 2011.
The old copyblogger theme used previously was ok, had some very strange SEO implementations and i just thought it was starting to look old.
Right… that’s it. Ive just noticed that I’m getting over 300 spam comments per day so I’m afraid I’ve had to install a form captcha system to try and stem the flow of this junk.
Sorry folks but there you go (the perils of having a dofollow blog i suppose)
Consider dummy well and truly thrown out!
For new website launches theres no better way of building initial interest than submitting your website to the plethora of online CSS galleries.
I’ve just discovered a freebie tool that promises to make this process even more pain free… meecss.com
Basically, you enter your website details and the wizard steps through each of the (more than 100) GSS gallery websites in turn and helps you populate the submission forms.
Its just a quick tool but it looks like a winner to me :)
SO you’ve created a great wordpress theme, got your demo site up and running and packaged the files for download… looks great so far.
But you know what really annoys wordpress theme users? When the re-uploaded packaged file is totally unpopulated and doesnt look anything like the dmeo theme you’re showcasing on your site.
Sure you’ve created a tutorial and possibly a custom admin panel… but that still means that we’re not getting what was originally shown – its like misselling. Think of buying a car only to find when its delivered that theres no seats, its uncoloured and theres no digits on any of the buttons… the same could be said of themes that when first uploaded and activated, dont represent the demo theme shown.
So back to my plea… can you please pre-install all of the content shown on your demo sites when themes are first installed.
Toledo: I think the things that most people leave out from...
Mark Rushworth: Hi Niall Ah i think youve caught a typo its...
Niall: Well, I Googled something about follow and dofollow plugins and...Niall: I am moving towards offering my blog for dofollow commenting....
Julius Jones: Thanks Mark! I know prefer the ping device you suggested...