Site sculpting with the nofollow attribute is slowly becoming a hot topic in the SEO world and the information that is being put around is not that clear. The nofollow link attribute was designed to relieve beleaguered forum owners and other open source content sites from the deluge of link spam that was clogging up their forum and general information pages. In a previous blog post on the true purpose of the nofollow link attribute, we discussed the correct usage of this attribute. So far, it’s worked pretty well for that purpose but as with all good things, there may be a dark side.

Late last year, Matt Cutts implied that a pro-active SEO use of the nofollow attribute could result in better PageRank for pages on your site leading to a heightened interest in this new SEO technique. A good visual explanation of site sculpting can be found here: http://www.evisibility.com/blog/no-follow-tag/. As recently as this week, participants in the Organic Listings forum at SES New York were recommending this new technique for improving the rankings of important pages of your site.

All this reminds me of a friend of mine who was convinced that he could make his back pain go away by gluing fridge magnets to his back. Magnetic fields may really have a medical use but so far as I know, nobody has been able to show exactly how to paste the fridge magnets on your back to maximum effect so he really had no idea whether he was using them correctly or not. Therefore, he was either doing nothing whatsoever for his back (the most likely possibility) or he could potentially be doing damage.

Site sculpting seems to me to be a little like this and a quick review of the most recent site sculpting buzz shows that I’m not alone in my confusion over the best use of this new SEO technique. I’m not endorsing all these opinions – just showing that there is some difference of opinion. One major problem is that not all search engines interpret the nofollow attribute exactly the same way:

How Google interprets the nofollow attribute:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=81749&topic=8522

How Yahoo interprets the nofollow attribute:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/indexing/nofollow.html
How MSN interprets the nofollow attribute – this is not explicitly mentioned in MSN HelpCentral but this was their original announcement on the topic:
http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2005/01/18/nofollow-tags.aspx.

These are just the major search engines. As far as we know, other engines like Ask.com do not respect it at all. In fact, there are still many questions about how search engines interpret the nofollow attribute.

All in all, we’re a little suspicious of the claims that Matt Cutts is endorsing the practice. Generally, Matt Cutts doesn’t promote techniques that could potentially manipulate search engine algorithms. This makes us worry that it won’t work and we will have wasted precious SEO time and effort. Or, worse, it will work but not to our advantage.As a result, we’re recommending that if a site owner wants to try it, they should be very careful only to apply it to links to pages that really and truly are unimportant and definitely do not need to be indexed.

The bottom line is that, as always, the best way to optimize your site is to only provide content and links that are valuable to your visitors. The homepage is the most valuable real estate on the site and only the most important links should be found there. If there is a link on your homepage that you are thinking of adding a nofollow attribute to, then maybe a better question would be why is that link there in the first place? In other words, instead of using the nofollow attribute to sculpt your site, try using your main navigation. In the end, it’s more durable and doesn’t depend on the ever changing whims of search engine algorithms.

Many companies today are starting blogs to help boost their SEO results. Blogs can be a great tool to introduce new content to the site in an easy to use fashion and without the resources of a web designer or knowledge of html. One great aspect of these blogs is the comments feature that allows users to post comments about your blog post. This is great because the comments are usually about the same topic as the post and can add a lot of good, indexable content to the page other than the main post.

But there is also a darker side of comments, the spam side. Blog comments are an easy way for people to spam links to their site because many people leave the option in WordPress “on” that auto approves comments. I know there have been many times that I had read a comment along the lines of “Great site, keep it up” or “Just surfed in and I love your site”. Sure they seem harmless, but comments allow the user to post his url and name with their comment. So the above two comments were posted by a person named “Buy Viagra Online” and were actually a link to an online pharmacy. This is not good for your site at all. Comments like this can put you into bad link neighborhoods and associate your site with theirs.

The problem is that not all comments are like this. The option to add your url is so other blogs can link back to their blogs. The idea of comments is great and the rewards of building a solid community outweigh the risks of possible spam. But if you are going to allow comments, you need to moderate them all. Check the users post; make sure it is relevant to the topic of your post and not a generic post. Generic posts can be a sign of an automated posting spider trying to spam blogs with open comments. Check the users name and url; you want to allow them to post their url because it is part of blogging but you should always visit the url a user gives to make sure you are ok linking to that site before approving the comment. Comments are one of the best things about blogging but if you are going to enable them make sure you moderate them properly.

I would like to share a few usability resources I have found that can quickly get you on your way to understanding your visitors and employing Best Practices for usability design.

www.useit.com
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a patent holder and renowned usability guru. You can find invaluable reports as well as all the content from his free AlertBox newsletter.

Don’t Make Me Think (Book)
This book provides an easy to follow, non-technical, yet revealing perspective into what goes on in visitors’ minds when they see your site, from the first impressionable seconds to the interaction with navigation elements minutes later. It details many case studies and guides you with Best Practices for designing for visitors so that you won’t have to teach them to use your site–they’ll know instinctively and will not have to think. It’s a short, but thought-provoking read with suggestions that you will soon want to implement.

www.uxmatters.com
This organization produces an e-zine about usability and design issues. Some of the content is a theoretical, but you can take something away from every article. This site contains a glossary of usability-related terms and abbreviations, conference reviews and access to archived articles. Though they have been around for just two years, there is a lot of useful content.

www.usability.gov
See your tax dollars at work. Uncle Sam has compiled research and guidelines for developing usable web sites. They include topics on everything from planning to designing to testing and refining your website. You can also find newsletters, articles and events related to site usability. They also sell their Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines book, which includes contributions from ‘experts from across government, industry, and academia.’

www.challishodge.com
A blogger with a large archive talks about ‘the user experience, design and strategy’ while applying news of current events in a broad range of topics from art to nanotechnology to Word of Mouth Marketing. In addition to the informative and interesting blog posts, lists of organizations, other blog sites, books and resources can also be found.

www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/index.htm
Poynter Institute runs tests on visitors’ eye movement behavior while reading multimedia and news-related websites. This site, as well as http://eyetrack.poynter.org/, gathers the findings and helps you understand what design decisions can help your site visitors look, and then hopefully click, where you want them to. Though this information is specifically pertaining to news websites, you should be able to apply the findings about images, font size and information recall to your design.

www.webstyleguide.com
Originally published by Yale University, Webstyleguide.com presents a logical, prioritized approach to Best Practices in web design with an emphasis on user-centered design. The guidelines start with a discussion on the design process and design goals, and continue with interface, site and page design, and then delves into visual elements and editorial style.

psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/default.htm
This resource’s goal is to assist you in designing a website for user, and does so by combining and presenting knowledge gained from many researchers on human interaction with interfaces. The Software Usability Research Laboratory, the laboratory responsible for this site’s content, includes research from the previously mentioned Poynter University and Neilson. In this resource, along with its sister site, surl.org, much of the text is supported by parenthetical notations so you can find the original publication of a researcher’s findings. Though this site was last updated in March 2003, and some of the suggestions are no longer in use, surl.org’s newsletter is current as of July 2007.