Smackdown!
Or, I guess more to the point would be, who’s the dumbass that didn’t follow up the report by manually checking before applying the penalty? I mean, c’mon now… you guys aren’t going to going to try and still claim that this whole mess is about penalties, after screwing up the PageRank of a company you actually own, are you…?
(Dammit, just before my TLA on the homepage was supposed to go live, too!)
Well, I’m not gonna blame THIS one on Rand! 😀
Back on October 9th, I blogged about a test I performed that demonstrated only the first link on a given page will count as far as ranking purposes go. In the thread where the test originated, pops (of TOONRefugee cartoon blog) asked what would happen if the first link were nofollowed. Since I had no clue, I decided to test that as well. Similar test as before, but checking the use of rel=”nofollow” on the initial link, and adding in a third link as a control:
If you are like me, then you probably link your header images to your homepage. It is natural behavior these days to click on the header of a page and expect to be taken back to the beginning. However, a recent experiment I conducted over on SEO Refugee, and a comment by Wit, has me rethinking that particular habit.
At least, not in the way most people seem to think. That’s just not the way it looks to me. This is probably the 4th or 5th time now I’ve seen the recent Rand fiasco speculated upon as being typical link bait (very nice read Li, by the way). Personally I thought the motivation behind this whole thing would have been more apparent, but I guess not.
Why don’t you out the sites you advised to purchase links? I mean, you clearly stated:
I’ve encouraged some of our clients to purchase links in the past and I suspect I’ll do so in the future (though we generally try to be extremely careful about it).
So, in the wake of Rand screwing up yet again, a bright shining ray of hope has at last emerged. No more must we webmasters huddle in fear of Google spanking us for doing what we have full right to do anyways. No more will people like Michael Gray, Rae Hoffman, or Andy Beard need to worry their little ole heads about the issue of Google trying to dictate how we can or cannot monetize our websites. Finally, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief, and stop worrying about it once and for all!
For any who might have been wondering what the original content said, the Rose DesRochers rant is back to it’s original form.
