There’s nofollow, so do we need noarrive?

Published by ndixon on July 15th, 2008 Leave a comment »

One of the most important methods attaining greater visibility in search results for your website is to generate incoming links from other, similar sites. But being linked to from the wrong sites can be detrimental.There is certainly a logic in search engine thinking: if site A links to site B, then site B is seen [...]

One of the most important methods attaining greater visibility in search results for your website is to generate incoming links from other, similar sites. But being linked to from the wrong sites can be detrimental.There is certainly a logic in search engine thinking: if site A links to site B, then site B is seen as being associated with the content of site A. This is a bonus if site A is already considered an authority within its niche. The best image I have come across to describe the importance and relevance of one site linking to another can be found at SEOpsCentre.com:

Try to imagine that each link pointing towards your site is like a beam of light from a torch … The more links pointing to your site and the more powerful they are, the brighter your site will shine, making it easier for Google to “see” what’s in your site when they’re looking to see if you’re relevant to a searcher’s query.

Content creators have complete control over where we shine our torch beams, through deciding where to point our torches, but also through use of the ‘nofollow’ directive

nofollow – don’t follow this beam, thanks

Too many outgoing links from a web page or blog post can ‘leak’ a site’s limited supply of light energy. The simple addition of rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink informs Google to ignore the light emitting from that link, therefore protecting our own limited pool of light energy from being spread too thinly elsewhere. Google not only ignores the light, it also refrains from following that link to its destination to see what’s there, while humans can still see and click the link to visit the destination.

Spammers love links

Links are the primary method search engine spammers use to boost their money-earning sites in the search engines. So-called “Black-Hat” practices include the creation of hundreds of websites all interlinked into a network. When a site is created, this network is used to shine hundreds of torch-beams at this new site, thus making it shine and getting it noticed.

Search engines (Google in particular) are continuously improving their methods to spot and down-rate such link networks, demoting the value of their collective torch-beams, and tagging them as ‘bad neighborhoods’. And here we have the potential problem.

You cannot control your incoming links

Just as it makes sense not to link out to – thus creating an association with – so-called bad neighborhoods, I expect you can see the potential pitfalls of receiving incoming links from such places. A link creates an association between the two sites being connected.

Search engine spammer sites frequently use content ’scraped’ from RSS feeds – it’s easy and it’s automated, leading to a constantly updated, never ending supply of content. In most cases, the scraped content will also include a hyperlink back to its originating site. If your content has been scraped, you could have your site associated to a bad neighborhood through their link back to you. Without your knowledge, your image with the search engines could become tainted.

Sinister SEO

I have never seen it happen to a site I have run, but the principle of negatively affecting your competition through tainting their site with bad neighborhood backlinks has been much discussed in SEO circles. In theory, it is possible.

A case for “noarrive”

You have no control over who links to your site, but if you discover less than reputable incoming links, it might be appropriate to request Google ignore those links, tagging them as being irrelevant to your content: the mirror image of the nofollow directive.

This discussion suggests having Google provide a list of backlinks to your site, attached to which is a ‘delete’ button to remove the association of that link from the Google index.

I propose being able to add a directive to your site’s robots.txt file to instruct Google to ignore links from specific domains or IP addresses. This provides more control and a broader scope to limit potential damage once the tainted back-link has been discovered. This ability would also kill any deliberate competitive damage to your site’s image with the search engines through tainted back-links.

Conclusion

Issues with negative effects of links – deliberate or otherwise – are never going to be eliminated entirely. As the search engines get better at filtering genuine connections from manipulated ones, so the manipulators find a new tactic – it is inevitable. But any tool we can employ to minimise such negative effects will inevitably lead to search engines providing more accurate and valuable search results to the searcher – and that can never be a bad thing for the internet as a whole.

Photo: Peter Mueller

Tags: backlinks, nofollow, search-engines, SEO/SEM, spammers
Posted in Link building | No Comments »