I usually sign-up for most SEO related newsletters. Most of the material is too general or out of date but they are useful as an indicator of mainstream views on SEO/SEM. Over all though, as Mr. Adams would say, they are mostly harmless.

However I was quite annoyed at the recent newsletter from Entireweb, entitled “Suicide in Cyberspace – Your Outward Links Can Kill your Rankings”, authored by SEO consultant Ben Kemp. Here’s an extract:

1-way Outward Links Are Toxic

Ok, lets assume you are a service provider, maybe a health clinic, and you deal with hospitals, other doctors, specialists, nurses, laboratories. So, as a benefit to your visitors, you place direct links to their The thinking was web resources on
your links page. Is that clever?

Most certainly it is NOT! Transfusion time, because you’ll be haemorrhaging Page Rank with nothing in return! Do it, but be smart about it, because there is NOTHING to be gained (by you) from linking to any site that does not link back. So make sure your links include the “nofollow” attribute that tells SE’s that the link is NOT a vote by your site for that site!

Link Content Is Mission Critical

This is mission critical because Google and other have decided that they can’t trust you to be honest about your site! Basically, it seems like there are two web tribes - those who know not so much about how things work, and those who know more than they should. There should also be a flourishing third tribe, who just build great sites with lots of terrific content that automatically ranks highly - but nobody’s seen nuthin’ from those guys for ages!

Now keep in mind that this newsletter goes out to 662,355 subscribers. So according to Ben, every single outbound link on your web site should have a “nofollow” on it.

Sorry Ben, that’s complete rubbish. Outbound links are a natural part of the web. They show that you connected to other key sites in your niche area and that you are aware of the authority sites. Linking out freely and often to relevant, similar themed sites is a positive thing.

It’s amazing how the “nofollow” cool-aid has spiraled out of control. The tag was designed to fight spam. The thinking was that spammers, denied Google juice from comment links on blogs and forums would move onto another technique. Of course that didn’t work but people still appreciated that the tag would maybe prevent Google condemning your site for linking to bad neighbourhoods.

These days though it’s turned into a required attribute for paid links, to keep you complying (according to Matt Cutts) with the rules of disclosure set out by the FTC. It’s also got mis-used in the way Ben talked about in this article, as some way to ‘horde’ PageRank for your site.

To me, blanketing your entire site in it just tells me you have no editorial control. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the future Google takes this as an indication of quality. After all, if you don’t trust any of your content, why should they?

I don’t want to be too hard on Ben here as he’s not the real culprit. The constant stream of link FUD coming out of Google is encouraging this kind of advice, culminating with the recent webmaster guideline changes:

[…] However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

* Links intended to manipulate PageRank
* Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
* Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
* Buying or selling links

At the moment it seems everyone is scared of linking. I can’t blame them, at the moment linking looks more dangerous than a game of Russian roulette with 6 bullets in the chamber. Despite Adam Lasnik of Google, pointing out that these rules are in the context of a link exchange schemes, the damage has already been done. Chinese whispers has taken over and now ordinary webmasters are scared into placing something as harmless as a link to help their users find more information.

Maybe Google wants everyone to be this scared of linking. When your algorithm is almost entirely based on link popularity, you are wide open for this kind of abuse. Self-policing is probably the best hope they have, as Rae Hoffmann has said, the only person who knows a link is paid is the person with access to the bank books.

If I had my way though, Google would cut out some of the FUD. I’d start with that badly written line about link exchange and reciprocal links. You should make changes to your web site for your users, not for the search engines. That actually used to be advice we heard from Google.

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