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I know, I know… I said I would update my experiment in a month, but the results demand that I update sooner. If you haven’t read the first article in this experiment yet, pop back a week and read “No Follow DoFollow, What?”, then come back here to find out what has happened so far.
Welcome back 
At the time that I decided to disable the do-follow plugin, Google was ranking the Netvibes Ginger article at #90 in the SERPs. By Wednesday, the article had rocketed up to #25 on exact match, and #23 on broad match, a jump of 65 positions! That’s 6 pages closer to the coveted front page of Google!
Unfortunately, I may have diluted the experiment a touch… You see, I went on a blog cleaning rampage, and in the process deleted any and all irrelevant posts from t-e, including a dozen sponsored posts. As you may be aware, Google frowns upon sponsored links, and has been shown to slap blogs that have them, so when I removed them I may have inadvertently put myself back in the Almighty G’s good graces.
I say may have, because I’m not entirely convinced (more on why in a moment) that the sponsored posts had very much to do with it, but in the interests of good research, I have to consider the possibility. So here’s the plan: As of the Monday night following the reinstatement of no-follow, the Netvibes article was ranking in the Google SERPs at #13 for broad match, and #16 for the exact term “Netvibes Ginger”, making for a total leap forward of 8 pages. As of right now, I am re-enabling the do-follow plugin.
If it’s dismissal was part of the leap forward, then turning it back on should cause the article to slide back down the results pages. In fact, that’s exactly what I expect to happen. Here’s that why I mentioned: You may recall that last Friday I had a guest poster here on t-e. Teeg wrote an article called “Web 2.0 for Small Business” for me. She also dropped a link from her blog to mine in an unrelated post. To be clear, this was an in post link, not in the side bar, or a comment, but a topical and relevant link back to techne-eikon.
According to Google, the link doesn’t exist. Period. I am getting no Google juice from Teeg’s mention, or from a couple of other incoming links that should be showing up. The other thing that I want you to notice here is that Teeg’s site (SUComments.com) is a do-follow blog, and does not have any sponsored posts. In short there is no reason that I am aware of that would cause Google to discount the link, save the do-follow feature. Hence, I think that enabling the do-follow here will cause me to get slapped as well.
So techne-eikon is once again a do-follow blog, and we will see where we are at in a week or so. While we wait, please feel free to leave a comment. What do you think? Is Google slapping us for wanting to share, and play nice with each other? Should they be allowed to get away with it if they are? You tell me
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 6:00 amand is filed under Link Love, Web 2.0, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Who knows the reason behind when someone\'s site has been slapped. We just need to stay honest.
Also, I\'d not be that much concerned about that little green bar. I would, instead, focus on continuously building my readership and maintaining a high standard in what I do and say. Sooner or later, Google recognizes real value, honesty and reality.
Just my 2 cents on that.
~Marcus
I am in full agreement, honesty will always (albeit eventually) win out. Unfortunately, many bloggers and webmasters pay a great deal of attention to that little green bar, myself included (at least for some of my other sites). The rationale is that we cannot make good decisions concerning our site policies unless they are informed decisions. Hence this little experiment: to further our ability to make an informed decision for what is best for us.
Who knows the reason behind when someone’s site has been slapped. We just need to stay honest.
Also, I’d not be that much concerned about that little green bar. I would, instead, focus on continuously building my readership and maintaining a high standard in what I do and say. Sooner or later, Google recognizes real value, honesty and reality.
Just my 2 cents on that.
~Marcus
I am in full agreement, honesty will always (albeit eventually) win out. Unfortunately, many bloggers and webmasters pay a great deal of attention to that little green bar, myself included (at least for some of my other sites). The rationale is that we cannot make good decisions concerning our site policies unless they are informed decisions. Hence this little experiment: to further our ability to make an informed decision for what is best for us.
Well although i don\'t care about PR but i have to admit currently Google is the favorite search engine and most of my traffic, i got them from uncle \"G\".
All of my blogs are a Do Follow Blogs and still get indexed by Google.
I read on some sites, labeling your post as a sponsored post is not recommended as Google will ignore and will not index any sponsored post.
Well although i don’t care about PR but i have to admit currently Google is the favorite search engine and most of my traffic, i got them from uncle “G”.
All of my blogs are a Do Follow Blogs and still get indexed by Google.
I read on some sites, labeling your post as a sponsored post is not recommended as Google will ignore and will not index any sponsored post.