Marketing Ninja

Of all of my del.icio.us favorites this week, I found these two stories about the highly negative impact that rel=”nofollow” has had in search to be the most fascinating.

First, let’s learn about how nofollow inadvertently creates “SEO blackholes” which end up favoring less accurate mega-sites like About.com, Answers.com, and WikiPedia instead of more accurate, more detailed niche sites. From SEO Blackhat:

Black Hole SEO employs a technique that causes the normal laws of Google Physics to break down. Link juice flows into a massive body, but can never escape. When employed on a massive body, it tends to dominate the SERPs.

A black hole site is created when an tier 1 authority site ceases to link out to other sites. If a reference is needed, the information is rewritten and a reference page is created within the black hole. All (or virtually all) external links on the site are made nofollow.

The first example of a black hole site was the wikipedia. The internal links formed a network that passed link juice from one page to another allowing obscure articles with no external links to rank number 1 in the SERPs. This #1 ranking begets natural links from external links. When a webizen wants a quick reference, they consult Google and link to one of the top results. This causes more link juice to flow into the black hole and the body’s trust becomes more and more massive over time.

1. Link juice flows in, but it can never escape.
2. External Sites lose link juice at the expense of the black hole.
3. The relative link juice mass of the black hole expands exponentially.

Major sites like Wikipedia, the New York Times, BusinessWeek, Bnet, and other “something for everyone” sites will eventually dominate the rankings for most major keywords should this trend continue, the author argues. Eventually ~70% of Google’s top 10 search results could be dominated by 40 sites or less.

Although I haven’t seen any numbers to verify this, I believe that the author’s explanation of how this will happen under Google’s current algorithm is believable. A fascinating ramification of the law of unintended consequences – Google actually gets worse search results as a result of nofollow links. Heh.

The next thing is about how many fanastic links distributed via microblogging (read: Twitter) are grossly devalued as a result of nofollow. From SEOMoz:

My understanding of the original intent of proffering nofollow as a solution to the problem of linking to untrusted places was that it was mainly intended for situations like blog comments, profile links, etc., where users of your site could create links to wherever they pleased.

This is definitely valuable (as anyone who has ever had to moderate blog comments can attest) but what about once you do trust the commenter? Since so many sites have no mechanism whereby that nofollow is ever removed, we end up in a situation where people are creating huge amounts of really valuable content and the links they create are nofollow.

In my opinion, some of the most “valuable” links on the internet at the moment are nofollow. Some examples:

• The average quality of outbound links from Wikipedia is incredibly high
• Many people are leaving their RSS feed readers untouched and getting their news via links their friends drop on Twitter
• We know many sites whose biggest sources of traffic after search are links which happen to be nofollow (leading to interesting discussion of the effects on the random surfer model)

So not only does nofollow end up crowding out great niche sites from organic search results in favor of less detailed information from megasites, but it also prevents Google’s users from discovering legitimately valuable content from these types of sources.

I think Will from SEOMoz has an excellent point – as microblogging starts to become a much more significant factor in how people share links, Google is simply going to have to start accounting for it in some way, shape, or form. The same goes for the other three examples he listed.

Moreover, Google is absolutely going to have to do something to prevent a handful of megasites which have seemingly shallow coverage of a large number of topics from dominating the search results, as that would inherently make Google less useful. If most organic search results are dominated by 40 websites, then guess what? Are we really going to need Google to find anything anymore, or will we go straight to Wikipedia/About/Bnet/Answer? Hmm…

Good going, Google.

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