DoFollow Blog

With talks of Yahoo selling off their non-core assets in order to survive the SE battle (or rather, to survive against Google), it raises big questions of what is to be sold and to whom? We’ve heard that they could be selling Yahoo Answers, but it really bigs the question, who would buy it? All signs point to Answers.com.

Yahoo Answers is a community driven knowledge website that allows users to both submit questions to be answered, as well as answer questions that are submitted by other users. It has grown to become the second largest reference site on the web next to Wikipedia, according to Comscore. Users are encouraged to participate by awarding points for logging in, answering questions, voting and being selected as the ‘best answer’ for any given question. The service attracts nearly 150 million monthly visitors.

WikiAnswers is another community driven Q&A website, but it has implemented the Wiki engine in order to constantly improve the questions and answers that are listed. This brings a range of more encyclopedic answers, whereas Yahoo answers is purely community based (and many answers can purely be random hearsay). Answers has already stated before that it intends to bring the two websites closer together, by incorporating both of these concepts. Whilst there are much better Web 2.0 models already in existence, none have taken off properly - so this acquisition would make perfect sense.

Whilst nothing has been confirmed yet, I really don’t see why anybody else would have any reason to really be in serious discussions with Yahoo about buying this section of their company.

The internet would be nothing without linking. This much is true. The way Google works is that each and every link to a website (with the exception of those with a nofollow attrib. pinned to them) count as a virtual ‘vote’ for the target website. To further increase the accuracy of their search results, Google implemented a system whereby they can weigh websites in terms of how authoritative they are. This system is known as a websites PageRank.

Here’s what we do know about PageRank:

* PageRank is derived from the inbound links to the page. It is independent of your keyword selection, quality of content or traffic. For simplicity’s sake, the PR of a page is basically dependent on how high the PR of the pages that link to it are. (There is also a dampening factor)

* Google Toolbar PR is out-dated. Your PR is ever-changing, and the Toolbar export only occurs every ~3months. Again, this is not definitive, but PR on the G toolbar can be up to 6 months out of date.

* PR != Good SERPs. This is what I’ll elaborate on.

Here’s an excerpt of what an SEO company has to say about PR:

Ultimately that can mean higher search result rankings for competitive keywords. PageRank, therefore, seems to be only a very small (but somewhat important) part of the overall equation. PageRank is judged primarily on a website’s link age, link volume, and link value.

Most authorities in the Search Engine Optimization industry, including both individuals and companies have denounced the once mythical status of PageRank. At one time, PageRank was so valuable that companies were willing to pay to increase their website’s PageRank (through link buying). As till recently, high PageRank meant high rankings nearly all the time.

Many, many people believe that PageRank is a very important part of the Google algorithm. It is not. It is a part of the algorithm, but high PR certainly does not mean you’ll crack the #1 spot. Having a high PR has been proven to be the difference in niches with very competitive keywords, but beyond that - the metric is only handy when you’re trying to sell links to people who still think the world of PageRank.

1. Not Deceiving your readers.

People say the ‘website’ field and want to drop a link to the website, but they’re unaware that they’re not even getting the full-weight of a proper link. Why? No idea, but I think the next step is removing the entire website field from wordpress.

2. More comments.
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Everyone’s got differing stances on whether NoFollow or DoFollow is the way to go. Personally, I think NoFollow was a great effort to reduce spam, but it really was a swing and a miss. Spam is still rampant on the internet, and it’s not going to slow down just because you’ve penalized everyone!