Free Website Promotion, Website Traffic, and SEO Tips

Google® announced a new attribute that could be put in your anchor tag that would prevent the Google® spider from following the link and passing it Page Rank®. This was done in order to prevent blog comment spam, and the like. However, web masters could use this tag on reciprocal links. This means that if they link to your page with the “nofollow” attribute, the link won’t help you one iota for Search Engine rankings. All the major Search Engines have announced that they will make use of this tag as well. So now, as a website owner you have to check to make sure that the link you get in exchange for a reciprocal link does not include the “nofollow” attribute. At the time of this writing there were no tools to do this. When tools become available I will add links to them from my seo tools links page. To check this by hand you can view the source code and then make sure that the link to your site does not contain the attribute rel=”nofollow”.

For example, here is a clean link to my website:
website promotion book

here is a link using the nofollow attribute:

website promotion book

For more on this tag look these articles from the official MSN®, and Yahoo® blogs:

http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/18/nofollow_tags.aspx
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000069.html

Sometimes the page that a web master will put your site on can not be reached from any other page on the website. In this case, the web master has created a links page that is by itself. There is no way to get to it, except to to go directly to the page. This is bad, avoid trading links with websites like this.

Sometimes the page that your link is on is not indexed by the Search Engines, this keeps the website linking to your website from passing Page Rank® to your website. The easiest way to determine this is by typing the URL of the links page into Google®. For example, say that you wanted to know whether my links page was indexed by Google®. You would go to Google.com and type in:

http://websitepromotionbook.com/links.html

Then you would click the “Search” button.

If my links page is indexed by Google® you will get a message that shows a description of the page along with other options, that would like something like this:

Work at Home Business Links
Work at Home Business Links. The resources below are here to provide you with great work at home websites for those who want to start their own online business. …

Google can show you the following information for this URL:

Show Google’s cache of websitepromotionbook.com/links.html
Find web pages that are similar to websitepromotionbook.com/links.html
Find web pages that link to websitepromotionbook.com/links.html
Find web pages that contain the term “websitepromotionbook.com/links.html”

If it is not indexed you will get an error message, that looks something like this:

Sorry, no information is available for the URL websitepromotionbook.com/links.html

If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: websitepromotionbook.com/links.html
Find web pages that contain the term “websitepromotionbook.com/links.html”

It is possible that the whole site has not been indexed yet. To check this type in the URL of the main page into Google® and see if it has been indexed with the procedure described above. If it has not been indexed, then before trading links you can wait for Google® to index the site.

It is also possible that the links page your site will be listed on is a new page on the website. The easy method of checking to see if a links page is indexed does not account for this. So the next couple of posts will describe the methods that webmasters use to keep their links pages (and other pages) out of a Search Engines index.