By Digital
“Ask an Skilled” is an occasional characteristic the place we ask ecommerce specialists questions from on-line retailers. For this installment, we deal with a query in regards to the search-engine-optimization worth to no-follow hyperlinks on social bookmarking websites, corresponding to Digg and StumbleUpon. The query comes not from a service provider, however from our personal social media director, Paul Chaney.
For the reply, we flip to Jill Kocher, website positioning supervisor with Groupon.com, a deal-of-the day web site. Kocher is an website positioning skilled and a Sensible eCommerce contributor.
When you’d wish to submit a query, e-mail Kate Monteith, employees author, at kate@practicalecommerce.com and we’ll try to deal with it.
Paul Chaney
Paul Chaney: “Social bookmarking websites, corresponding to Digg and StumbleUpon, use no-follow hyperlinks. If I had been to ‘Digg’ an ecommerce product, the hyperlink again to the ecommerce web site could be no-followed. Many individuals use Digg, after all. Do no-follow hyperlinks on these bookmarking websites have website positioning worth to the positioning that’s been bookmarked?”
Jill Kocher
Jill Kocher: “The brief reply is that social media websites and different websites that no-follow their hyperlinks present no measurable, direct hyperlink constructing worth. That stated, all related hyperlinks to high quality content material from high quality websites have oblique hyperlink constructing worth, in addition to crawl boosting, traffic-driving and model recognition worth.
“Search engines like google and yahoo deal with the rel=nofollow attribute utilized to the anchor tag as a sign that hyperlink recognition shouldn’t be handed via that hyperlink. It’s primarily a means of not vouching for the standard of the positioning being linked to, and is closely utilized by websites that permit customers to insert hyperlinks into content material that isn’t reviewed earlier than being revealed. If Twitter, for instance, didn’t no-follow hyperlinks that customers put into the tweets they posted, Twitter would appear to be vouching for all kinds of low high quality and even spammy pages to which customers selected to hyperlink. So from the social media websites’ factors of view, rel=nofollow protects them from vouching for spammy websites. Sadly, it additionally prevents them from vouching for top of the range websites.
“On the oblique link-building entrance, websites can’t hyperlink to content material that they don’t know exists. Social media websites play a job in oblique hyperlink constructing by selling content material to an ever-widening set of customers and their pals. Some fraction of these customers will theoretically discover that content material helpful or priceless in a roundabout way and hyperlink to it from a weblog they personal. It might even be cited within the media. These hyperlinks could possibly move hyperlink recognition.
“As as to whether it’s priceless to submit particular person product pages to social websites, sometimes the reply is ‘no.’ Except the product has some form of mass enchantment, loyal fan base, or is accompanied by a contest, query or different type of person engagement, a product web page publish to a social media web site will possible simply be ignored. Furthermore, over time ‘good friend’ ranges will deteriorate if solely product pages are submitted.”
