The specific term? No, I haven't. I prefer plain conversational language that everyone can understand, not technical mumbo-jumbo jargon that only industry insiders can comprehend in a pathetic and vain attempt to make themselves feel more important than they really are (which is not at all). But yes, I know what the concept is. It's taking a Web site's content and separating it into multiple sections with each section having its own topic (in a nutshell). Considering how the Web site is not even accessible nor search engine friendly (scripting for menus with no text-based fallbacks are a BAD idea), I highly doubt he even knows what the hell he's talking about in the first place. You also don't seem to be following along with what I'm saying, either. I'm not saying that structuring your site's content and organizing it properly is a bad idea, because it's a great idea and should be done before a single word of content or line of code is written. This falls flat in the realm of information architecture, not search engine optimization. If you don't know how your site is going to be structured, then what's the point of even optimizing the on-page content for the search engines (and don't give me any crap about optimizing sections - or "themes" for the search engines anyway, since proper IA takes care of this before the site is even built and the content is written)? In a way, it reminds me of a dog chasing after its own tail. Cute, but pointless and utlimately futile. So what he's saying is that cramming everything under the sun into a single Web site rather than focusing on a single topic, then linking those pages together was hurting those sites' rankings? Wow, big shock there. Apparently they don't know much of anything about proper information architecture either because you do NOT mix multiple major topics onto the same Web site unless you use subdomains to separate them (a popular example of this being Yahoo.com). As for smaller topics, they're separated by section, as TFWP even mentions (the peanut butter site analogy). Again, this has nothing to with search engine optimization, but instead information architecture (which is the design and organization of content, functionality, navigation and ease of use - aka usability - of a Web site, and how the information on that Web site is presented to users and search engines alike). Furthermore, rel="nofollow" is an ATTRIBUTE of the ANCHOR ELEMENT (<a> tag), not a tag. If you don't even know what an element, attribute or value are, I strongly suggest you pick up a book on structural HTML markup and learn, because you're not going to be doing anything right without learning it. Now, with regard to the link you provided about using rel="nofollow" it's an interesting example, but it does suffer from one flaw. Used in the context that the article provides, I'd consider that link to be RELEVANT to the topic of that particular page, and since rel="nofollow" would be used there, that would mean the search engines don't see that link, meaning as far as they're concerned it doesn't exist. No arguement there. I've also never said to link to as many pages as possible. What I've said is that you want people linking to YOUR pages. Inbound links and all. When you DO link to external pages (meaning those not on your site), do so sparingly, and make sure that the page you are linking to is relevant. The act of linking to another site's page is seen by the search engines as a "vote" for that page. The more "votes" a page gets, the more popular it is seen in the eyes of a certain search engine (I'll touch upon that in more detail later in this post) that for the sake of this post won't be named at the moment. If I have a site about American football, am I going to link my pages on that site to pages on other sites about Russian politics or the Battle of Thermopylae? No, of course not. I'm not going to because those topics aren't even close to being related to each other. Thank you for sharing your opinion of my SEO skills. Whether you are right or wrong however is not for you to decide. Let the record speak for itself. Did I ever at any point in time to claim to know what the Google algorithm is? Did I at any point in time claim to work for Google? Or any other search engine? No, i did not. So don't go about making any assumptions as to what I may or may not believe or know when you clearly don't know what I believe or know. As they say, "[a]ssumption is the mother of all [foul] ups." If I'm wrong, back it up with facts. If not, well, I'll let your silence speak for itself if you don't present anything of value. When you receive a link from another site's Web page that does not use rel="nofollow" you get a "vote" in the eyes of Google. I mentioned this earlier. The more pages voting for you, the better. Especially if those links are natural and organic in nature and are also related to the topic being discussed on that page. That's back-linking at work. When you get a link from a page that does use rel="nofollow" guess what? It doesn't count. It's like not completely filling in the circle on the ballot card for the candidate you're voting for at the voting booth (Kane County here in Illinois doens't use electronic voting machines since they're so prone to abuse and "misinterpretation" just as the punch-hole system is; instead we use a permanent ink that voters must use to fill in a circle for the candidate or referendum we are voting on, but that's enough of that off-topic discussion). Yeah, the link is there, but the search engines don't see it and thus you don't get credited for it. Why then would linking from your page to another page work any differently? It's like saying the rules work this way for one person but differently for another when playing a game. Obviously that would be the case if there's a clear distinction between people (players and dealers) but there is no separation here. Just one page giving an endorsement of another with its link. How hard is that for people to understand? I've been doing this for five years. Four of those five years were spent studying user-centric semantic Web site design and development, information architecture, usability and accessibility, and Web copywriting. When I started learning SEO, I noticed right away that a lot of the so called jargon was actually lifted from these other practices. The rest (PageRank, and the difference between domains and subdomains for instance) was very easy for me to pick up. All of which are being used for maximum effect on a search engine site I'm in the process of developing for a particular hobby of mine (table top miniature warfare gaming). So no, I don't read on other forums trying to learn only to get spoon-fed bullshit by other people. And to be honest, Digital Point happens to be one of the worst offenders out there that I've seen. And as far as your comments about rel="nofollow" I'll let my rebuttal of it speak for itself. Every time you link from one page to another, that pages loses some of its "weight" or "value" - the trick to balancing that is to have more links coming in to that page than you do going out. A good analogy (coutesy of Chris Beasley) is a bucket of water with incoming links being the water that's poured in, and the outgoing links being water that's poured out. If you have more water being poured out than there's being poured in, you're going to have an empty bucket. If you have more water being poured in than there's being poured out, you'll eventually fill up the bucket. Linking works in much the same way. The more links coming in, the more "weight" that page will have; the more links going out, the less "weight" that page will have. Who are you agreeing with? (I'm just curious is all, there's a reason why your post got quoted in this carpet-bombing campaign of mine, and that reason is coming up in the next sentence.) You make a great point about notifying people about acknowledging your use of rel="nofollow". If you're going to use it, tell everyone that you are. At the end of the day, honesty is the best policy, even if someone's feelings do get hurt a little in the process. Frankly, I'd rather hurt someone's feelings by being honest than by lying. At least with honesty there's the chance that I can make it up to the person being hurt. Actually, your outgoing links can affect your PR if you have enough outbound links that are getting counted. That's why it's better to have more links coming in than you do going out. Please refer to my response to a previous quotation in this post for more information. Quality content that people want to link to and that is written with the search phrases (keywords) people are using in their searches are what's actually going to increase your rankings in the SERPs. It's such a basic tenet, why don't more people understand this? Yes, outgoing links will help, but they're far more likely to help the other site than your own. Unless somebody says THANK YOU and links back to your page, of course. That they are. Yeah Nick, please do. If you have facts, present them. (Feels good about backing Trapped up.) Didn't I just say that about 50 times in this thread? (Yes, I'm agreeing with you there.) Define SEO then. At least your interpretation of it in this case. I don't want to disagree with you and debate something when we both find out in the end that we were agreeing with each other the whole time. Doing something once does not mean it's true. Try reproducing the same results with the same experiment five or six times in a controlled environment, then do so again in the wild a few times and get back to us. And of course linking to link farms (or as one person I know calls them, "crappy click-through link advertising whore sites which have no purpose even existing in the first place") and other "bad neighborhoods" and other non-relevant pages is going to drop your PR. It's common sense. Do you honestly think that you can walk through Cabrini Green in Chicago, Harlem in New York or Gary, Indiana and not come out unscathed every time? Of course not. You're going to get mugged eventually. Or what about walking into a bookstore's romance books section when you're looking for the next polticial action thriller by your favorite author on the genre (feel free to replace the genre and author with your own, of course). Same thing with these bad neighborhoods and other time wasters with the search engines. They're not related to your page, so of course you're going to be penalized for it. BINGO, give this person a beer!
Dan - I'm surprised such an expert on SEO like yourself has not heard of Bruce Clay? He is one of the original SEO experts... I don't think you have much ground to stand on, but debating with you is not what this forum is for. I just do not like your quote "I highly doubt he even knows what the hell he's talking about...". He ranks #4 for search engine optimization in google... Man he must have some idea of what he's talking about eh? Everyone has made good points here. I'm done with this thread.
Great post there, but I have to disagree with this part. When you are linking to other pages, I don't think you lose any PageRank for that. Linking to other pages is normal, and Google will not penalize you for that. The only thing they have stated (in their Webmaster Guidelines) is that having very many links on one page lowers their weight, and may get the page banned or penalized. The number they used was 100, I believe. Linking to irrelevant pages may be a different thing, but I don't think you would link to completely irrelevant links naturally. That's the case only when you are building a link farm, and then you are probably near the 100 links anyway.
Hi Dan Schulz. Great post - I'm beginning to get a grip on best practice for my outbound links. My dilemna still stands. I am writing what I hope to be an 'authority' article - the problem is I personally don't class myself individually as an authority. I was hoping to give my article more weight by backing it up with relevant links to sites that are trusted, peer reviewed and contain verifiable academic and scientific studies and reports that no one can dispute. I have about 30 links to sites that would help readers see that I'm not talking rubbish. I have done my research but I am now wary that my article will be 'diluted' in the eyes of search engines because of the number of outgoing links. One idea I've had is to create a separate page called 'reference material' for example on my site, and use this for all of my links (on my authority article) so that they are seen to be a 'vote' for a page on my site and not 30 votes for external sites. Is this a valid way way to get round the problem or do I just bite the bullet and hope that I eventually get enough incoming links? BTW I'm loving this (sometimes heated) debate. It demonstrates to me that SEO can be a very personal business and not always an exact science. I think that sharing information is the best way to learn and then it's up to the individual to use their better judgement to sift through the c**p and find the best way to go forward.
Great post Dan!!! Modeca, you seem to be wayyyyyy wayyyyy to paranoid about PR. As you build more and more experience in the field you will see what I mean. For the time being if you want to keep the entire PR , a) simply build and insert your 30 or what external links through an iframe, that will pretty much do it OR b)alternatively you can display your external links through javascript
It seems we're agreeing and disagreeing on the same thing at the same time. Perhaps I should have clarified myself (I tend not to do that when I get emotional, like with the post you replied to with the post I'm now quoting). I never said that your PageRank will go down by linking to another page, just that it can if you do it a lot and you don't have enough inbound links coming back to that page to make up for it. One or two outbound links though won't be that bad (it'd be like a scratch instead of having the skin torn right off ). Just be yourself and you should be fine. Just bear in mind that writing for the Web is different than writing a term paper. If you can stand a trip to the local public library, see if they have a copy of "Web Copy That Sells" by Maria Veloso. It'll show you the ropes when it comes to writing effective Web copy for people. My own Web copywriting style was influenced heavily by this book, combined with my own committment to using plain conversational language interjected with light humor from time to time. If you like, I can review your article for you and suggest any changes before you publish it. (Note, I am not a professional copywriter. I just happen to be pretty good at it.) Don't worry about it. Those links are to external resources which are relevant. If your article is good, you promote it properly and effectively and people start linking to it, any "harm" done by linking to those pages will quickly be negated and out-weighed by the incoming links to your page. Who knows, the owners of those links might even notice that you're citing them as resources and might even return the favor (it's happened to me a few times here on the forums with posts and threads I've written). I'm really not a fan of links pages, but if done right, they can be effective without being seen as spammy. I'd rather keep the links in the article itself and make sure that any links are relevant to the content around them. If I were to create a links page, I'd link to that page at the bottom of the article as a listing of citations used in the main text for reference and attribution purposes. Read above. You'll also have to do some promoting as well. I might be able to help you with it if the article is related to Web design. What topic is the article going to be covering? Most of it's really just a cottage industry of con artists selling snake oil to village idiots. The rest is a combination of information architecture, Web copywriting, Web development, and marketing/promoting your Web site to those who would find the site to be useful (those in your niche/market). For example, if your site is about paper airplanes, I highly doubt that Lockheed Martin would be interested in the site. However, if your site was about Jack Russell Terriers, then the Jack Russel Terrier Club of America (JRTCA) would probably want to know about your site, and may even feature it if the content is relevant and meshes well with the organizations goals and objectives. Not necessarily. People would still submit their sites to the search engines. And the number of pages indexed would be dependent on how many of those links use the rel attribute anyway. Both of which can impair the accessibililty and usability of the Web page. Since Modeca's page will be brand new, it really won't have much an impact anyway, and as such would be pointless to do so.