Whilst on my Christmas holidays I was having a read of some of the SEO blogs to keep up to date and I read an article by SEOmoz claiming that PageRank sculpting using nofollow still works. I almost fell off my chair!!
For those of your who don’t SEOmoz has one of the best blogs in SEO circles, so their opinion matters and is read by a large number of people in the industry and if you’re wondering what a NoFollow is, it’s an element that we SEO types used to add to links within wsebsites to control the flow of PageRank around a site, a technique that Google declared mid 2009 was no longer effective.
My responce to reading the article was half bewilderment, that I had missed something so massive and believed what Google had said (normally my rule is to take what Google says with a pinch of salt) and half incredulous, wondering if SEOmoz trying to deliberately misinform the industry and take us back to the days of SEOs pretending they had some kind of secret knowledge.
Low and behold on 12th January (about 2 weeks later) SEOmoz hold their hands up and say “Sorry guys we made a mistake”, I’m still wondering if this was part of a strategy to get more traffic to the site, if it was or not is irrelevant, it’s certainity damanged their credibility in my eyes.
On New Years Eve Aaron Wall posted a blog to SEO Book asking Is SEO A Science or Art? In this article he addressed the legitimacy of the SEOmoz post and Skitzzo even published an article the day before predicting an SEOmoz appology.
The industry does need to question the perceived wisdom every now and then, but this has reminded me once again that all blog posts, websites and comments are subjective opinions and should be treated as such. We shouldn’t be too reactive after reading such things.