Don’t Pee from the Diving Board

This post is about SEO. Or rather, it’s about Google and Pagerank and the nofollow issue.

But first, a joke.

This guy gets thrown out of a swimming pool for peeing in the water.

“Why am I the only one you’re kicking out? I bet other people pee in the pool too!” he protests.

“Well, Sir, the others are not doing it from the top of the diving board.”

In other words, when you’re doing something that might piss off the lifeguard, be discreet about it. You may get away with it if you keep it quiet, but shout about it from the top of the diving board, and you may be leaving management no choice but to kick you out.

Ok, enough of the story. Now on to Google Policies.

Not about to explain the whole nofollow vs. dofollow issue again and my position on the topic. Click the links in the previous sentence to get the full picture – bottom line is I’m a dofollow blogger.

In my view, pagerank and the way “link juice” flows is Google’s problem. I prefer to show search engines the same thing as my surfers are seeing – if the link is on the page, I see no reason to nofollow it.

Swimming in Google’s Traffic Pool

If you want to swim in Google’s pool, you need to know the rules.

The one thing Google really frowns upon?

Selling or trading your “link juice”. I mean, these guys have teams dedicated to sorting out sites that sell outgoing links. By sorting out, I mean deleting them from the index. No Google traffic for you and you and you.

They do not want you to dabble in any form of exchange where you purposefully trade links for some sort of a benefit to yourself. Money is one form, but there are others too. How about more traffic to your blog? how about links on other blogs? how about tweets?

Now, here’s the thing. You can still exchange links, you can still allow links in comments, and you can still ask people to mention you in their tweets. Where I think you are treading on thin ice is when you go out and announce that you are giving “link juice” for it. That’s such a big no-no in Google books, why risk it?

I’m not saying you should nofollow your links. All I’m saying is I’d be wary of stating that I am purposefully giving out Pagerank or link juice as if it was some prize in its own right.

Much safer to offer traffic, reputation etc. I would leave the pagerank element out of the statement. Doing it is one thing, but from the diving board?

For the record: I do not advocate peeing in swimming pools!