A recent post at SearchViews about the Twitter and Whoopi Goldberg dustup got some decent exposure, which included a link from the Larry King Live blog at CNN. The link itself sent some traffic which is always a good thing but there was some rumbling because there was no attribution to the original post, just a link that said Read More (nice anchor text BTW). The blog did not even mention where the story originated. Oh well, at least SearchViews got some free traffic and some link juice from a fairly big blog. Oh, wait that didn’t happen either.
Larry King is a Black Hole
So after some further examination I discovered that not only does the Larry King blog nofollow all external links, all internal links are nofollowed as well. On top of that the blog uses the noindex, nofollow meta-tag thus telling search engines to ignore everything on the blog. I did a very quick and dirty review of the other CNN blogs and noticed that old Larry’s blog looks to be the only black hole blog at CNN. Not sure why that is but apparently CNN does not want the additional page views or ad revenue that the Larry King blog could bring if search engines were allowed to index and rank it. Maybe Larry needs to look into why CNN hates him and his blog, of course since he probably has nothing to do with the blog other than letting it use his name he probably doesn’t care but CNN is making a huge mistake by not at least allowing search engines to index the content.
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That’s a strange thing to see. I know Bruce Clay does/did(?) SEO for CNN, but who knows when it comes to their blog. I’m sure they have some crazy reason for doing this.
Yeah, it’s weird. I hope they have a reason for it considering the fact that all of the other blogs are not blocking search engine but I really don’t know. You would think that they would try to capture as much traffic as possible which is why I question the rationale of blocking search engines. Makes no sense to me.