SEO

  1. New Domain

    August 18th, 2009
    By Rob Hughes

    Well, I’ve been thinking I don’t like my url that I’m on anymore (admittedly I only recently moved onto it, but still)

    I’ve purchased two new domains now – just need to decide which one I prefer more:

    • http://www.seotone.com/
    • http://www.inverseseo.com/

    Main problem I’m having choosing is that although I prefer the sound and feel of InverseSEO more than SEOTone, the latter looks more legible when written down in URL format, can’t decide if that matters or not.

    When I think about it a bit more in depth I’m not actually sure I should really use either of them since the majority of my posts don’t really have anything to do with SEO at all, more so with random comments and thoughts.

    I do think though, if I had more traffic I may post some more interesting blog posts and put more thought into them rather than just putting them up without even proof reading things!!

    So, now – admittedly mid post – I have decided I’m definitely going to go with one of these two domains… also I’m swaying towards inverseSEO…. hmmm I shall have a think!

  2. Dofollow Links on Twitter

    August 5th, 2009
    By Rob Hughes
    Well, unfortunately I got told I shouldn’t post this when I wanted to buy a friend, but now it appears that some sites have already published it so I might as well – I wrote this post on about 28th July.

    Right I’m still not sure I agree with all this nofollow and dofollow rage on links and I believe in their importance, however, since there is no proof that I’ve seen to show that what Matt Cutts has said isn’t true at the moment I’ll go along with it!

    So, this is a pretty simple thing to do, and it’s pretty easy to notice as well so I presume many people have already considered doing something along this line – I’ve not seen it written up anywhere though so thought I’d document it myself :)

    I did actually notice this quite a while ago, I sent an email around the middle of June to a couple of guys at work as they hadn’t seen it, even though I had spotted it a month or so before then just wasn’t sure if anybody would care!

    Ok, I’m still probably miles behind the time here, but I’ve not been actively posting and looking for twitter plugins for a great deal of time.

    Ok, so rather than re-writing it again I might as well post the email up as it says it all:

    Hey,

    I’ve found a way somebody could “exploit” twitter’s nofollow attribute if you are interested (I know how you feel about nofollow and follow links).

    Anyway, if you make a twitter update from a plugin of some sort, whether browser, mobile, website, etc. it gives a follow link to what made the post…

    I made a post from a plugin within my WP blog which has given me a follow link to my website – the anchor text can also be manipulated through the plugin settings on the blog itself.

    I thought even though you aren’t here you might like to hear my random thought of the day!!

    Have fun,
    Rob

    That pretty much says it all to be honest, but just to show that this does actually work, this is an email I recently got from Google Alerts:

    Google Web Alert for: link:www.robh.me

    Rob Hughes (_robh_) on Twitter
    Decided to change the styling on my twitter profile… don’t like the colour of the normal text but can’t decide what to pick at the moment!4:08 AM Jul 10th …
    ________________________________________
    This as-it-happens Google Alert is brought to you by Google.

    Remove this alert.
    Create another alert.
    Manage your alerts.

    This is the link documented been seen in Google (no cocky responses about it being the only link there, I have never and am still not motivated to try and get links to my blog because, apart from this post, I never really post anything that I care if people read or not!)

    link:www.robh.me

    This is the Tweet that was associated with the link strangely as there is no link on this tweet:

    http://twitter.com/_robh_/status/2566535015

    Here is an example of a dofollow link from my twitter:

    http://twitter.com/_robh_/status/2842997329

    Well, there we go, that’s pretty much the culmination of what can be done – I personally don’t agree with using this technique and would class it as “blackhat SEO”.

    I thought I should publish this post so that at least everybody that reads here (not many people admittedly) would be aware of this fact and then hopefully Twitter would make a modification so that people can no longer exploit them for links in this way.

    I presume Twitter will combat this soon after people start majorly taking advantage of this, they seem to be pretty quick on the uptake so far with things like this!

    Unrelated Paragraph:

    The annoying thing for me really is that I’ve changed the URL of my blog, so now all these links are getting created they do my little good anyway as the whole domain www.robh.me is just 301 redirected to www.falconpunch.co.uk anyway! (I really need to go my links on my site as well and make sure they are pointing to the right place).

  3. Blogs Removing Nofollow

    July 8th, 2009
    By Rob Hughes

    I Recently read a post from Hobo SEO Company about killing nofollow links on their blog.

    I thought this was a pretty good idea really from discussions that we’ve had at work and tests that have been done we never really though rel=”nofollow” on links did what everybody else believed anyway… then Matt Cutts came along and confirmed that this had been the case for around a year now and everybody was just talking rubbish!

    Anyway, back on point, I do think this tactic by Shaun Anderson is a good idea for many reasons:

    • Nofollow doesn’t do what it “used to do” anyway so no major benefit of using this
    • Allowing follow links will encourage people to interact further with his blog with the hope of getting a link
      • Although this does seem like a bad thing at first because people will only be interacting to get the link, it’s not as bad as it seems because since everything is highly moderated on his blog anyway, any content that gets a link will be because the reply/trackback is adding content

    I’ve really kind of forgotten the line that I’m going down with this post, but I still think that Shaun Andersons idea is a good one…

    Admittedly I won’t be doing it – mainly because I’m lazy – but there is not a great deal of point since my Blog gets no traffic and even less people commenting on it!!

    Well that’s my depression out the way for the day, merged very “un-noticably” into a blog post, time to go get some lunch!

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