Administrator 0

Relative or Absolute Links for SEO?

By Administrator, December 12, 2006 in SEO
For those who need a refresher, an absolute link is a link where the full URL is given in the link such as “a href=http://www.masterlink.com/news.cfm” whereas a relative link only provides the name of the folder/file such as “a href=”news.cfm”.

Now, while most people have been taught to just use relative links, it is actually not the best for both search engines and preventing people from scraping your site content. Some people tend to use relative links because the shorter code can decrease a page’s download time and decrease the amount of typing they do. However, a millisecond is about all that is saved this was as far as load time and the majority of users these days are not on a 14K dial-up anymore.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago last week there was a Q&A session that had top engineers from MSN, Google, Yahoo & Ask as well as other top figures in the SEO world. A question was posed as to which type of links were preferred, all of the search engines agreed that an absolute link is the way to go. I agree with them not just because they are the experts but because their reasoning makes sense.

People who go to a site by typing in the URL (although many people are just typing the url into a google search and then clicking the first result) may enter the www or may not (e.g. www.masterlink.com vs masterlink.com). To a user, either one makes sense as they see the pages the same. Now, when search engines crawl links they don’t want to crawl the same thing over and over again. If they crawl a link to the non www site, then every page linked from there (if it has relative links) will keep the spider on the same non www URL. Now, when they crawl through a link with the www in front of the domain - they see this as a different page and will index all pages again. Essentially they are giving each page a rank twice and crawling twice as much.

So, if you put all absolute links and a spider comes in from a link that doesn’t have the www, you will guide them back to the www pages and then only rank those pages and save them the time of crawling a site twice or more. This also stops what is called PageRank bleed - meaning that the one page gets all the juice and isn’t spread across two versions (the www & non www) of the same page. This is can actually be seen on our site (no, we are not perfect here, but always work to improve ourselves) if you check the PageRank of http://masterlink.com/news.cfm and http://www.masterlink.com/news.cfm.

Please follow this link and paste each of the above URLs into the box to see the difference in ranks.

Another thing that should be done is for all requests for a website without the www to be redirected to the www version of the site. So if I typed in masterlink.com there would be a 301 redirect to www.masterlink.com which is just a back up guarantee that they hit the right pages. Search engines can sometimes still get mixed up so this solves this canonicalization problem.


Now, some of this may sound crazy, I agree to an extent, but ultimately search engines drive the majority of Internet traffic (~87%) so playing by their rules can only enhance the opportunity for good rankings.
 
Administrator 17

“nofollow” - Does it Really Work Like Google Claims?

By Administrator, November 29, 2006 in Google, SEO

I am not one to usually try to stir up debate or call the search engines out for misleading people, but I still can’t figure out what a “nofollow” tag REALLY does. That being said, I know what it SUPPOSEDLY does, but there is data to contradict this claim. After reviewing an experiment I did, it seems that Yahoo and MSN are obeying the rules, but Google, who was first to encourage the use of this tag is not doing what people think it is.

For those of you who do not know what the “nofollow” tag does, here is a quote from Search Engine Watch:

“If Google sees nofollow as part of a link, it will:

    1. NOT follow through to that page.
    2. NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
    3. NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for.”

Now, I did a little experiment that anyone can do (some may call it blackhat - but to me it is just research) to test whether these benefits of the nofollow tag actually work in each of the 3 major search engines.

What I did was go to the AskDaveTaylor.com blog and found an article to which I posted a comment. I chose this site due to its strong page rank and its level of trust in the search engines as seen by his many rankings - thanks Dave :-). The post that I left is under the name of “Mark Warranty Peterson,” just a random name with a keyword in it and linked to the site “theautoclub.com”. Now, since the comments are on this blog are treated with the rel=”nofollow” tag, you would assume that none of the 3 rules of nofollow as outlined above would be disproven.

Ok, so here it is a few months later and the page that I left the post on has a PR5 and the SE algorithms have all had time to fully evaluate this page. So, I went in and did an exact search in Google, Yahoo and MSN for “Mark Warranty Peterson”. Now, one would think that the only page that would show up in the results would be for the page in which the post was left. Well, the only search engine that lived up to this belief is the infamous Microsoft Live Search. Microsoft also did not include the page with the post in a backlink check to theautoclub.com

Yahoo’s results showed the page of the post and one spammer page. A backlink check of the domain (theautoclub.com) in Yahoo did, however, include the page from the post that had the nofollow tag.

What did Google show? Hmm…..this is where I was VERY SURPRISED. The results show the page with the post on it, AND the page to which the nofollow link points! They did not show this page in a backlink check, but when does Google ever show many links there anyways. Now, the other interesting thing theautoclub.com is now ranked #74 for “Mark Warranty Peterson” (edit: now showing at #70 on page 7). Notice that this is a broad match for this term and not an exact match query and the site does not have the word Peterson anywhere in the whole site. I then decided to check the cache of the page after finding it at #74. What did Google have to say about the search query?

“These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: mark peterson“

Now, if I read correctly, according to a Google post, ”when Google sees the attribute (rel=’nofollow’) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.” Well, this seems to be pretty good proof that this isn’t true. I also have the server logs to show that Google has crawled through this link to the destination website in the link with the nofollow. That disproves that Google will “NOT follow through to that page.”

Now, I am pretty sure that I am not the only person that has done this test and seen the results. This must explain why I haven’t seen a decline in comment spam on my blogs as it looks like the “link condom” is broken…

So, can somebody help me out and explain exactly how Google REALLY treats the nofollow tag?