Ive given in to my anger and am going to talk about the clusterfuck Matt Cutts recently caused by saying that nofollowed links leak link juice that could be going towards dofollowed links.

Basically Cutts used pretty pictures to make the point that if you had ten links on a page, and 10 “points” of link juice to give, if you nofollowed five of the links, the ten points wouldn’t get split between the remaining dofollowed links, but the link juice that WOULD have gone out via those nofollowed links if they weren’t actually nofollowed, simply evaporated, and the remaining dofollowed links would still only pass one point of link juice, not two.

Did you get that?

Irrespective of the fact that Google implemented this change around a year ago, and apparently no-one noticed, any self respecting SEO will be making a note of this change as they look to optimize their, or their client’s sites moving forward. So now instead of sculpting pagerank (which Cutts calls an “Advanced SEO tactic which not many SEOs would be using - wrong! I know where I work, its just a standard part of the initial SEO overview/setup for ALL new clients - analysing where pagerank will best be utilized, and funelling it to those pages), SEOs are simply going to limit the number of outbound links on the page.

Which is where I come to Joost de Valk. Many of you will know Joost as the all round top bloke and super dooper Wordpress plugin developer of gems such as the Sociable plugin.

In a nutshell, the Sociable plugin places a bunch on social bookmarking icons at the bottom of every post in your blog. The idea is that someone likes your post, clicks the icon at the bottom of the post, and easily bookmarks the post to sites such as Sphinn, Stubmleupon etc.

The problem is, that this plugin, depending on how you choose to use it, can drop up to 20 or so outbound links at the bottom of every post. If you choose to have it display on your home page as well, and show ten posts on your home page, that could be 200 outbound links on the page.

Now in the days where we thought that those nofollowed links didn’t affect our ability to keep link juice on our site, this wouldn’t have mattered. Now - not so much.

I know I’ve regrettably uninstalled the plugin, I assume any other bloggers with SEO at the forefront of their minds will be considering doing the same thing. It’s a case of trading off the ability for readers to easily bookmark your posts, and the benefits that may bring, against throwing away a huge chunk of your link equity.

There are lots of people looking for dofollow blogs to comment on. God knows I’ve done my share of both manual and, ahem…, automated blog commenting myself. But are you getting value from all the supposed “dofollow” blog lists?

Probably not:

Listen up idiots, This is not a dofollow blog, for god’s sake, you can’t even leave fucking comments here. Most of the blogs listed on those lists are now nofollow, or have had the comments turned off altogether. (I turned them off because even after making outbound comment links nofollowed, the spam kept rolling in, clearly by idiots too stupid to install a nofollow link checker such as Search Status, or spammers who aren’t smart enough to write scripts that actually check the validity of a link they’re about to drop.)

Have a look down the bottom left menu, that list is a list of recent referrers, see how many of them are from supposed Dofollow lists of blogs? Yeah, this blog had dofollowed comments, once, before I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle (Yeah, I know, Oh the Irony!)

So clearly people are just republishing old lists, some of them over a year old, to try to drag in some traffic from people looking for dofollow blogs to comment on.

But feel free to keep linking to me in your Dofollow Blogs lists.

(…..yeah, I know )

It would appear that Microsoft has jumped the gun on Google’s changes to its AdWords Brand Bidding Polices:

WTF???

Whilst I’ll say nothing of the non standards compliant steaming pile of crap that is IE8, surely this is taking things to the extreme, no?

In what will surely cause a massive shakeup in the SEO industry, Google seems to be rolling out some new options to its SERPS.

The new “Show Options” link in the top left corner of the SERPS opens up a whole new bag of tricks google has obviously been working on for some time.

I’m seeing it in google.ca results at the moment, but not in my local google.com.au yet.

The options allow you to filter your SERPS in a number of ways: Videos, Forums, and Reviews.

The interesting thing is that you can now determine the time frame of the results you want to see:

• Recent Results
• Past 24 Hours
• Past Week, and
• Past Year
  

  w00t! New Google SERPS options

All of these results allow you to sort by date, which is clearly an attack on Twitter’s efforts to implement real time search.

Another option is the (pretty cool) “Wonder Wheel”. I’m not sure at the usefulness of this, but it looks like it could be a bit of fun.

You can now also choose to expand the text snippet of each result, clearly the result of Google’s experimenting with longer snippets over the last few months.

So what does this mean for SEO’s?

Well clearly for link builders, it offers a completely new arsenal of tools to find places to get links.

As far as rankings and getting clicks from the SERPS, I’ll reserve my judgement, but if one thing is obvious, freshness of content is becoming more and more important.