Using No Follow Or Robots To Protect Your Blogging Income
Writing by Brick Marketing on Sunday, 17 of February , 2008 at 7:39 am
If your blogging income comes from pay-per-post or other paid links then Andy Beard’s response on how he intends to get around Google’s penalties for paid links may interest you.
Google would like to see all paid links using the rel=nofollow tag to prevent those links being followed and so earning page rank link juice. If your blogging income is from paid links then you will know that the advertisers do not want the nofollow tag being used - it runs contrary to their intention for a paid link.
Andy Beard’s approach is not new, but may be novel in this situation. He is targeting his Robots.txt file. This file directs the search engine robots to the directories and files that can and cannot be indexed. Andy’s theory is that if he excludes the paid links files from indexing, the included links should not be followed - if they are not followed they are not earning ‘paid link juice’.
The theory is that links may appear in other editorial entries to compensate for the robots exclusion. Those links are not paid for so they should not draw any penalty. Andy also notes that whilst these pages are not going to be indexed by Google, they will still be syndicated through email and RSS feeds and through various directories. The links may draw ‘link juice’ from those placements.
This is fine and I agree with this scenario. I wonder though if Andy has gone too far in broadcasting this to the broader public, and Google. I am sure that Google will now look at this situation, particularly if it is picked up by others, and consider extending its penalties to those that only use the robots file to limit indexing.
Using pay-per-post for blogging income and the Google page rank penalties are an interesting issue - I am sure the tug-of-war is far from over.
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Comment by Andy Beard
Made Sunday, 17 of February , 2008 at 12:40 pm
It will be interest, but if someone chooses to syndicate one of my paid reviews, that is a pure editorial decision.
As it happen in the article I linked through to one of my paid reviews on Search Newz, owned by the WebProNews guys. When they picked it up for syndication I actually dropped them an email just to be sure they knew it was a paid review, and they were quite happy syndicating it as it was good content.
If they have made that kind of editorial decison, those links really are valid, or should be in Google’s eyes.
Comment by Blogging For The Money
Made Monday, 18 of February , 2008 at 8:52 pm
While reading Andy’s entry earlier today I couldn’t help wondering how advetisers will react to it. Most paid review companies now offer advertisers the option of letting bloggers add “nofollow” to the links, and advertisers aren’t interested. In other words, advertisers are seeking to buy linkjuice.
Restricting the indexing of those paid reviews using robots.txt is like using a meta “nofollow”, in a sense. It may keep Google off of Andy’s back, but it’s not going to give the advertisers what they’re looking for.
Comment by Allen Taylor
Made Wednesday, 20 of February , 2008 at 12:58 am
Andy’s scenario seems like it would work from a webmaster’s and syndicated content perspective. But will advertisers buy links on the potentiality of syndication? There is no guarantee that content will be picked up by other websites and that leaves advertisers in a little bit of a lurch. It seems like such speculative links would not be worth as much as direct link juice.
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