Search Engine Marketing Blog: piloSEO

Everyone who uses the Internet with any frequency knows that Google is the biggest player when it comes to everything online. What used to be a simple search engine has now grown to be the way many average users access and interact with the Internet. That means that any business that wants to be found believes that they must be indexed and ranking well in Google. In many cases this is true. Google search can deliver phenomenal traffic to a site that is well indexed. It also means that they face competition from a number of places and every other week I hear about another Google killer, usually in the form of a new search engine. I think it will be hard to displace Google in the short term but I have been thinking that Google may be the only entity that can kill Google. And one way they may be doing that is through their consistent insistence on using No Follow for certain links.

Why Does Google Push No Follow?

How you ask? Well, first we need to go back in time. One of the most important aspects of the original Google algorithm was links. Google treated links as votes and in the beginning many SEOs figured out that by getting a bunch of links pointed to a site could push it to the top of Google. This lead to all sorts of link schemes designed to artificially boost a site’s Page Rank and help it rank higher. One by one these link schemes stopped working and SEOs moved on to other link schemes. For the most part Google was able to identify these schemes and devalue the links. With the exception of one. That one was paid links. Paid links are hard to identify algorithmically. Sure, they could identify some paid links but the majority went undetected. So Google got a great idea. They told Webmasters that they should use No Follow (originally a blog spam fighting tool) on any links that were paid for. And to make their case their case they went out and punished some of the easily identifiable paid links. The SEO industry picked up on this and the No Follow revolution took off but…

How Can No Follow Kill Google?

Most of us in the SEO world understand what No Follow is and how it should be applied but Webmasters who are not involved in SEO are confused. They see penalties being applied, hear about No Follow, and begin applying it on every out-bound link, even those that are not paid. I recently spoke to a client who runs a popular and respected site about No Follow. They knew to place No Follow on their advertiser links but they also believed that it should be added to every link that went to a third party site. I explained that this was not the case but I wonder how many Webmasters out there believe that they need to add No Follow to all out-bound links? As more and more Webmasters learn about No Follow and apply it incorrectly it could cause a huge problem for Google.

Since Google’s algorithm uses links as a big component for ranking it could be harmful if all links are set to No Follow. If more and more sites start telling Google not to follow the links to other sites Google could face an issue in that they can either disregard all of the links or break the the No Follow attribute they developed and actually pass link juice to No Followed links. They could also take the link factor out of their algorithm and rank sites based on content only but I don’t see that happening soon. It may be far fetched but as more Webmasters misuse No Follow and hinder Google’s ability to crawl and index pages it might be the most viable Google Killer we will see in the near future.

Update: Michael Martinez has an excellent post, How search ruins the Web experience, that further explores this idea in much greater detail.

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