SEO - the Magazine Story

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Promotion |

Respected Search Engine Optimization practitioner Graywolf uncovers a poignant story in the SEO realm of what happens when you have just enough knowledge to hurt yourself. Graywolf illustrates a “textbook example” of how a diligent webmaster nonetheless made a wrong call from having not quite enough knowledge of search engine protocols.

Graywolf in his post “Allure.com - How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot with No Follow“, points to the website’s use of an HTML tag called “nofollow”, which was originally proposed by Google. The purpose of the tag is to tell Google that actually the link CAN be followed but should NOT be accorded any importance. This has a bearing on how high in its results pages Google will rank a page (because “page rank” derives from incoming links to a degree).

The Allure site added the “nofollow” attribute to its own internal link going to its “subscribe” page, thus depriving the page of its natural importance. The result is that “lesser” websites gain in importance relative to the Allure site for its own subscription process. And this matters greatly, to the tune of money, because Allure is also paying affiliate websites to send it traffic, and the higher in the search results those affiliate websites can appear, the more clicks they’ll receive, and the more traffic they’ll have to send to the Allure home site, for a commission.

Graywolf shows a screenshot of the Google results for the search term “subscribe allure magazine”, and Allure Magazine appears in position number 5, with its own affiliate marketers appearing above it in Google’s page. What this means is that Allure is paying commissions on clicks to its affiliates that it could have kept for itself - as Graywolf points out, undeniably Allure has the “right” to appear at the Number 1 position (this accords with Google’s observed pattern of putting brand-name owners at the top of the hierarchy of brand-name search returns).

Allure is not appearing at the top because its own internal linkage, Graywolf claims, is “squandering” its natural importance, and this derives from its webmaster’s misunderstanding of the SEO trick of using the “nofollow” attribute, which is described more fully in the article. It would have been better not to add the “nofollow” attribute.

The article is a perfect look into the mind of a webmaster who DOES know enough SEO to count. While Graywolf is taking screenshots of the search engine results and the website links, he’s also giving a “brainshot” of the inside of his head. Who knows how he happened to come to the site - we can guess that he noticed the low rank of Allure in a query involving its own brand name - but we can see him pausing in puzzlement, and bending to the task of following some links back upstream, checking the underlying HTML code in a page, and thinking, “Ha!”

And then, being a modern webmaster, realizing he had a perfect blog post for the next day. And it was a good post, from a successful SEO expert, generous with his knowledge.

We note in passing that the “nofollow” attribute was proposed by Google specifically to counter certain determinations that would otherwise be made by its own algorithm. This was to offset the efforts of spammers trying to “game” the search engine by gaining inappropriate importance from links in the first place. So Google actually joined in with the game of gaming Google. Sometimes in the market peripheries of SEO one hears the claim that Search Engine Optimization is unnecessary. Google would disagree.

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