High Rankings Advisor: Why Did I Lose Google Traffic? - Issue No. 284

High Rankings Advisor 284 - Your Host: Jill Whalen
In Today's Issue Search Engine Marketing ---> 9 Steps to Diagnosing Lost Search Engine Traffic High Rankings Happenings ---> Need Your Google Adwords Tuned Up? ---> Need Help Diagnosing YOUR Website Problems? Twitter Question of the Week ---> Have you seen sites obviously penalized…? Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week ---> Keyword-Rich Domain Name Masking Advisor Wrap-up ---> I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy   Introduction Hey everyone! Hope you're enjoying some warm weather. I think we've had the air conditioner on more already this year than all of last year. At any rate, I've got lots of good stuff for you today, so let's get straight to it. – Jill   Search Engine Marketing Issues ++9 Steps to Diagnosing Lost Search Engine Traffic++ For the past few weeks I've been tasked with reviewing a few different sites that have seen a loss in traffic – their owners hoped to find out why. I love these kinds of reviews because it's like solving a mystery or figuring out a puzzle. While it's not always possible to determine the exact cause for the traffic loss, I can usually make some educated guesses based on what I dig up in Google Analytics. Here are 9 steps you can take to diagnose the cause of lost search engine traffic: Determine what type of traffic loss you're dealing with. Many people look at Google's overview page, see a loss of overall traffic to their website, and assume that they must have lost their rankings in Google and the targeted traffic that comes with it. This may or may not be the case. Be sure to check for search engine traffic, and even more specifically Google non-paid traffic. Look at the extent of the traffic loss. Your research will be very different depending on whether there was a gradual decline in traffic or a sudden, drastic drop. I reviewed a site last week that lost all of their Google unpaid traffic overnight! This sort of loss is typically a technical issue such as a robots.txt file or a nofollow directive that keeps search engine spiders from indexing your pages. Sometimes it's not actually a loss of traffic at all – your analytics code could have been inadvertently removed from all or most of the pages, making it appear like a traffic loss. I have seen all of the above more times than I can count in just the last couple of months! Compare apples to apples. Many businesses are cyclical or seasonal. A gift site may see huge spikes in traffic the months leading up to Christmas or the weeks before other holidays. This means that comparing any month to the previous month may not tell you the whole story. A drop in traffic in January is probably fairly normal for a gift site. If you've got more than a year's worth of data, you'll want to compare this month's traffic to the same month in previous years. Ideally, you'd of course want to see a growth in traffic. And if you don't, then you may very well have a problem on your hands. If you don't have data that goes back that far, you can compare month to month, but be sure to take the data with a grain of salt. Review and filter out "brand" traffic. Most websites get a lot of Google traffic from people who've typed some version of the name of their company as their search query. You'll want to note whether those visitors have significantly increased or decreased. If you receive fewer visitors for your brand, this could be caused by a decrease in marketing and advertising. Once you make note of the brand traffic, you'll want to filter it out so you can study actual keyword traffic, which is what real SEO traffic consists of. Analyze which keyword phrases have had a significant decrease in visitors. Now that you've filtered out the brand traffic, you should be able to see the keyword phrases that are bringing you the most traffic. If you have lots, you may want to view 100 phrases at a time rather than the default of just 10. Are there lots of keyword phrases that seem to bring far fewer visitors over the last few months as compared to last year at the same time? You may also notice some that are bringing significantly more visitors. Do a quick Google search for the phrases. If you're not seeing any pages from your site on the first page in Google, it may or may not be a clue (given the fact that everyone sees different search results) but it is definitely a cause to investigate further. If a page from your site does show up fairly high in the list, it could just be that fewer people are searching for that phrase now as compared to before. Or it could be that your listing isn't quite what the searcher is looking for based on your title and descriptive snippet. There might also be other results for the keyword phrase that have images or video embedded whereas yours doesn't. Or there might be local map results showing up that make your result less appealing. Review the landing page for the keyword phrase that lost traffic. Is there any obvious reason why it's not bringing in as many visitors as it used to? Does it even exist anymore? Did it change substantially at some point during the year? Did it get buried deeper into the site architecture for some reason? Is the content duplicated from other pages within your site or contained on other websites? Were there links pointing to it at some point that no longer are? Does the copy read naturally, or are there a few extra instances of the keyword phrase than really makes sense to a person? Review your long-tail traffic. Since the end of April and early May 2010 a few large sites lost a substantial amount of traffic for keyword phrases that brought small numbers of visitors individually, but in aggregate they made up a lot of website traffic. You'll want to filter your keywords to those that have only a few visitors (even just 1) and see if there are significantly fewer of those than previously. If this is the case, Google has gone on record stating that they're doing a better job at sending long-tail traffic to more meaningful and relevant pages than they used to. Which means you'll have to go above and beyond what you're currently doing if you want to get that long-tail traffic back. Decide if you're dealing with a search engine penalty. For drastic drops, in the rare cases where it's not a technical issue, you're most likely dealing with a penalty. You can check your Google Webmaster Tools account to see if there is a notification of a penalty, but they don't usually bother to tell you. Still, search engine penalties are much rarer than people think. In fact, most website owners know what they've done wrong when they have a search engine penalty. There are some cases, however, where they may have been duped by a less than scrupulous "SEO" company. The penalties I've seen seem to occur on sites that have no redeeming value because they have the same products and content that can be found on many other sites (often ones owned by the same company), plus they are deeply entrenched in massive link farms. It's likely that they are also hosting part of the link farm on their own site in the form of a link directory. If this is what you find, you may be better off to start from scratch rather than trying to salvage the penalized domain. I hope these steps help you diagnose your own loss of traffic. I imagine they will keep you busy for quite some time! If you feel that you've lost search engine traffic and would like me to take a closer look to determine what the problem might be, please fill out our contact form and mention it in the "Business Goals" section. I can review most sites that have Google Analytics installed for a one-time $600 fee. Jill Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, a Boston SEO Consulting Agency. Share your comments and thoughts here. P.S. If anyone would like to republish the above article, please email me your request and where it will reside, and I'll send you a short bio you can use with it for your site.   Twitter Question of the Week This week I asked my Twitter followers: Have you seen sites obviously penalized by Google and, if so, what was the cause? Here's how they responded: TheMadHat: Yes...buying links. piconsulting: Contracted by a lawyer for SEO, had been banned for shady links. kennyhyder: Yes. Bad links. robwatts: Thin affiliate sites. Hidden text. Doorway pages. Ext. link manipulation. Paid links. Competitor links. Cloaking. Hacked. terryvanhorne: Any technique that doesn't go their way is most SEO's Google penalty. Anything you do just for SE's has inherently more risk. rishil: Link buying, Gbot cloaking. wiep: Yes. Selling links, thin aff, cloaking, hidden text, doorway pages, link networks, noframe spam, mass dupe content. benpfeiffer: Yes. But also surprised what they don't catch. Automated penalties/filters on dup content, link selling, thin affiliates. Want to participate in the Twitter Question of the Week? Follow @jillwhalen on Twitter Share your comments and thoughts here.   Advanced Forum Thread of the Week Forum member "KemoSabe" wanted to mask a keyword-rich domain with a more memorable one for humans. See what the other forum members told him or share your own comments here: Keyword-Rich Domain Name Masking   Advisor Wrap-up That's all for today. What a week it's already been. Some [expletive deleted] toad decided to attack our server this weekend and it took many days for the hosting company to get things under control. The High Rankings site is still coming in very slowly at times for some people, so if you've followed any links in the newsletter, you may need to be a little more patient than usual. If something times out, just try it again and it will likely work for you. My hope is that everything will be a bit faster and smoother by the time this newsletter hits your inbox. In other news, it's my birthday this weekend. Long-time readers will remember that I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on the 4th of July! I'm old enough that I'll refrain from providing you with the year, but I'm sure if you dig into past newsletters you'll figure it out as I'm sure I've divulged it in the past. Oh yeah, and have I told you that my oldest daughter, Corie, whom you may have heard me mention once or twice (or 50 times) through the years, has accepted a job in the Houston area? While we and all her political buddies will miss her in Mass., it's a great opportunity for her. So perhaps you'll find me doing an SEO seminar in Houston at some point in the next year! Keep cool and I'll catch you in 2 weeks! – Jill   Today's issue is also available online in the newsletter archives. If you prefer RSS/XML please feel free to use our newsfeed here. Feel free to forward this email in its entirety to anyone you feel might be interested in it. Paid sponsor ads are clearly marked as advertisements and neither High Rankings nor Jill Whalen take any responsibility for the claims made within these ads, nor the websites they point to. Paid ads do not constitute an endorsement for the products, services or companies advertising in the newsletter. Please visit our sponsors and use your own due diligence for any purchases you make on the Internet.	High Rankings Now Offers Google AdWords Help! Get Google AdWords Help: Campaign set-ups, tune-ups, ad creation, weekly maintenance at a fixed rate of $85/hour. Our AdWords helps is not based on your media ad spend. Spend as much or as little as you need. Click Here to Learn More About Our Google AdWords Tune-ups   Written SEO Evaluation for YOUR Website - Only $600 Looking to have your website reviewed by hand for SEO pitfalls that may be preventing it from receiving the search engine traffic it deserves? What you'll receive: Jill Whalen will personally review your website for SEO problems preventing you from receiving all the targeted traffic you deserve. An emailed report written by Jill of the issues she found. Answers via email to any questions about the review. Learn which tasks will provide you with the biggest bang for your buck and stop missing out on highly targeted opportunities and sales. This is NOT an auto-generated SEO report! Request Your SEO Website Review Now!
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High Rankings Advisor: Algo Changes Effect on SEO - Issue No. 283

High Rankings Advisor 283 - Your Host: Jill Whalen
In Today's Issue Twitter Question of the Week ---> Could today's SEO be tomorrow's spam? Search Engine Marketing ---> SEO Never Equals Search Engine Spam High Rankings Happenings ---> Need Ongoing SEO Help? ---> Written SEO Website Review of YOUR Site Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week ---> My Boss Doesn't Get It Advisor Wrap-up ---> That's all for today!   Introduction Hey everyone, I hope you're having a productive week! Today's HRA format is slightly different – I've temporarily moved the Twitter Question of the Week above the main article. I realized that it makes more sense this way because they're related. Other than that, you'll find the same valuable SEO info as usual. Enjoy! – Jill   Twitter Question of the Week True or false? Today's SEO could be tomorrow's search engine spam with the turn of an algo crank. Here's what my Twitter followers said: RustyBrick: True kennyhyder: Not if you're a good SEO. janetdmiller: Agree with @RustyBrick – True. timstaines: Anything "could" be tomorrow's SE spam with an algo tweak. Emma_Lee1: If your focus is rankings & immediate returns you'll be tomorrow's spam. If SEO for people to find needed info you'll be OK. ann_donnelly: False. Good SEO techniques are the ones that stand the test of time as they are just good practices to follow. georgebounacos: Yes, esp. those on the edge. But best practices centered around users & usability are likely to be safe forever. rishil: Absolutely Freaking True. Proviso: You don't keep up with guidelines. If you do – you may escape. MCIMaui: True as SEO is not a regulated field. But if U R focused on SEO that builds interest/benefit 4 the visitor, U should OK. Jill's response: Wow! Just wow. This one needs a much longer response than I can put into the Twitter Question of the Week thread. See the article below for my response. Want to participate in the Twitter Question of the Week? Follow @jillwhalen on Twitter Share your comments and thoughts here.   Search Engine Marketing Issues ++Search Engine Algorithm Changes Effects on SEO++ Here's a quick question for you: Is what you do to optimize your website going to be considered search engine spam one day because of a change in the search engines' magic formula? I strongly contend that it shouldn't. If you're not using spammy SEO tactics, that is. When I posed this question to my Twitter followers, I was shocked to see how many people felt that yes, today's SEO techniques could definitely become tomorrow's search engine spam if the search engines decided to change their ranking algorithm. The Real Story Good, professional SEO that puts users first while keeping search engines in mind will never be considered spam by any stretch of a search engineer's imagination. Search engine spam takes a concerted effort and is done in an attempt to make low-quality websites or content show higher in the search results than they should. Search engine spam can be visible on a website, such as with keyword stuffing, or it can take the form of hidden text, cloaking or link spamming. Generally, search engine spam makes a website *less* valuable for real users rather than better. Make no mistake about it, keyword stuffing in all its forms – be it the copy, the title tags, within image alt attributes, or in anchor text – is search engine spam – there's no purpose other than to try to increase rankings. And the same thing can be said of useless off-page SEO through link farms, low-quality directories that nobody visits, useless article submission sites and the like. I see all of the above often discussed as SEO tactics. But they're not. They are search engine spam. Search Engine Spam Does Not Equal SEO One of the largest problems plaguing the SEO industry is that the general public thinks that SEO = SPAM. This is why, every year, numerous articles are written saying that SEO is dead. What they mean to say is that search engine *spamming* is dead. Because they equate search engine spam with SEO, it's easier to just say that SEO is dead. Now you might be thinking, "Hey, wait a minute there, Jill. I've used some SEO techniques in the past that don't seem to work anymore, particularly after a major update by Google. They used to work great until Google decided they didn't like it anymore." In reply, I would ask you to revisit whether the technique was in truly making the website better (or worse) for the people who come to the site. Chances are that, if you're honest with yourself, you'll agree that you probably went overboard with things. Just because your "spam" increased your rankings for a while doesn't mean that it was a true SEO tactic – it was always spam whether you thought about it that way or not. And that's what confuses people. Before you tell me to get off my high horse and stop calling you a spammer, let me tell you a story about me. Just like you, I was once a search engine spammer! My Story Back in the early 2000s, I realized that I could keyword-stuff the alt attributes (alt tags) of invisible GIF images that were used within some website's code as part of the design. It seemed to work to increase the page's rankings for the keywords I was stuffing in the code. In fact, I wrote an article about it in my newsletter at the time. When a few colleagues emailed me back to nicely explain that my technique was in fact search engine spam, I poo-poohed them. I had built my reputation on using legitimate SEO techniques to gain targeted traffic, not search engine spam. Who were they to call me a spammer? I was quite indignant! But I was really just lying to myself to protect my own ego. Eventually I saw the technique as the search engine spam that it was and stopped using it and recommending it. Although I don't recall if that was after it stopped working or before! (I'm not a saint, ya know!) The point is that the technique was always search engine spam. It was spam when it DID work, just as it was spam when the algorithm changed and it no longer worked. It wasn't the change in algorithm that suddenly made it spammy. Why Search Engine Spam Is Bad It is my strong feeling that search engine spam is never a good idea. Not because you might get caught, penalized or banned. You probably won't, at least not until you've made quite a lot of money off your technique. It's wrong because it makes your site worse, not better overall. And more than that, it makes for a bad searcher experience. We all have to use search engines, and there's nothing more frustrating than having low-quality garbage show up at the top of the results. Let’s face it, the search engineers don't change their algorithms all the time because they're bored. Nor do they change them to stick it to innocent website owners. They tweak them so that they can preserve the integrity of their search results. If search engine spammers weren't out there vying for positions at all costs, there would be fewer algo tweaks being made. Unfortunately, the world is composed of many people who will take any system and exploit it for their own gain. It's a sad fact of life that creates a constant battle between search engines and those who are happy to spam them. Which brings us back to my original question of whether today's SEO tactic might be tomorrow's search engine spam. There's only one answer to this – NO! No legitimate SEO technique will ever be considered search engine spam because real SEO enhances a website as well as the search engine results. Good SEO makes it easier for the search engines to show the best stuff to their searchers. If you suddenly lose substantial search engine traffic, be sure to revisit the techniques you were using. Were they really and truly good ones? Did they enhance your website for all its target audiences? Did they make the search results more relevant or less? Or did you make them just because they were easy and it seemed like a good idea at the time? Jill P.S. I should also mention that you can see me in person discussing responsible search marketing at the next SEMNE event on July 20th, in Rocky Hill, CT. It's free for SEMNE members and $49 for non-members. --- Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, a Boston SEO Company. Share your comments and thoughts here.   Advanced Forum Thread of the Week ++My Boss Doesn't Get It++ Forum member "flarbas" posted that they were frustrated because their boss (who is a salesperson) suggested crazy changes to the company website (which apparently flarbas was supposed to make) even though no thought, research, or testing had gone into the changes. See how other forum members advise this member on how to handle the dilemma.   Advisor Wrap-up That's all for today! Hope June is treating you well. Things are getting busy around High Rankings headquarters. Lots of new SEO website reviews and site audits to take care of over the next few weeks. Let me know if you're interested in one for your site. Just fill out our contact form here. We're getting quotes for a new heating system at home...blech...what a pain! Does anybody know if the newfangled computerized system is worth the money? I'm thinking probably not. Catch you in 2 weeks! – Jill   Today's issue is also available online in the newsletter archives. If you prefer RSS/XML please feel free to use our newsfeed here. Feel free to forward this email in its entirety to anyone you feel might be interested in it. Paid sponsor ads are clearly marked as advertisements and neither High Rankings nor Jill Whalen take any responsibility for the claims made within these ads, nor the websites they point to. Paid ads do not constitute an endorsement for the products, services or companies advertising in the newsletter. Please visit our sponsors and use your own due diligence for any purchases you make on the Internet.	Need Ongoing SEO Help? Check out our Services! Get the SEO help you need from an experienced, trusted SEO advisor. Click Here to Learn More About Our SEO Services Now   Written SEO Evaluation for YOUR Website - Only $600 Looking to have your website reviewed by hand for SEO pitfalls that may be preventing it from receiving the search engine traffic it deserves? What you'll receive: Jill Whalen will personally review your website for SEO problems preventing you from receiving all the targeted traffic you deserve. An emailed report written by Jill of the issues she found. Answers via email to any questions about the review. Learn which tasks will provide you with the biggest bang for your buck and stop missing out on highly targeted opportunities and sales. This is NOT an auto-generated SEO report! Request Your SEO Website Review Now!
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High Rankings Advisor: More Google Tracking - Issue No. 282

High Rankings Advisor 282 - Your Host: Jill Whalen
In Today's Issue Search Engine Marketing ---> Appending Tracking Codes to Email Sigs ---> Dupe Content From Tracking Link ---> Ranking for Local Keywords – Part 1 ---> Ranking for Local Keywords – Part 2 ---> Linking to Low-Authority Sites High Rankings Happenings ---> Need Ongoing SEO Help? ---> Written SEO Website Review of YOUR Site Twitter Question of the Week ---> Do you ever use nofollow...? Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week ---> Load Speed – Affecting SEO? Advisor Wrap-up ---> Busy Time   Introduction Hey everyone! In today's Q&A edition, I've answered a few follow-up questions from last week's newsletter on creating tracking links for Google Analytics, plus I've answered a few questions about SEO for specific localities, and have provided a few other SEO nuggets that I hope you'll find interesting. Let's get straight to it! – Jill   Search Engine Marketing Issues ++Appending Tracking Codes to Email Sigs++ Dear Jill, In last week's newsletter you mentioned appending email signature links with campaign tracking codes. Can you please detail how to do this? Thank you. Ilene ++Jill's Response++ Hi Ilene, The information on creating and appending Google Analytics tracking links was provided in the article linked to within last week's article, called "Measuring Your Marketing: Campaign Tracking via Google Analytics." Good news – if you think you have to use a long and ugly link in your email signature, you don't. As long as you send HTML emails rather than plain text, you can create an email signature that uses anchor text as the link to your site, and the long, ugly tracking URL will not be seen in the email. So, for instance, in your email signature, you might be using a tracking URL such as: http://www.example.com/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=email signature But in the email itself, you simply link whatever anchor text you want using that URL. You can even make the anchor text just be www.example.com and link that to the long, ugly tracking URL. You do need to be familiar with how to create signatures and insert hyperlinks, but in general, it's no different from adding any link as you normally would in your email program. Hope this helps! Jill Share your comments and thoughts here. ++Dupe Content From Tracking Links++ Hi Jill – great article about tracking links to a website! So, I have a question about the duplicate content issue when you append tracking codes. I've just sent out an email with a special link in the signature which points to one of the Google-generated URLs. With that URL, I'll be able to tell to whom the email was sent and when. But, as a safety measure to avoid duplicate content, I've included a 301-redirect in the .htaccess file, as follows: Redirect 301 /?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=0510 http://www.mysite.com Will this fix it or do I have to use the canonical element? I'm concerned about passing link juice. Thanks much, Lauren ++Jill's Response++ Hi Lauren, Glad you liked the article! No, you don't want to use a server-side redirect such as that, because the tracking data won't be captured that way. Because you're just sending it via an email, if you don't expect people to link to a URL, then I wouldn't worry about it. But if you feel there is a chance some might link to it, then yes, the canonical link element (rel=canonical) is the perfect solution for this type of problem. Best, Jill Share your comments and thoughts here. ++Ranking for Local Keywords – Part 1++ Dear Jill, We have a puzzle we can't seem to figure out. Why does one of our websites come up #5 on Google under the keywords "our keyword phrase Los Angeles" when the keywords "Los Angeles" are nowhere to be found on our pages? We also see one other site on page 1 that has the same issue. The only common denominator is that we are both physically located in Los Angeles. What criteria could Google possibly be using other than where the domain is registered or where the servers are located? Thanks. Alex ++Jill's Response++ Hi Alex, According to Google, there are links pointing to your site that use the phrase "your keyword phrase Los Angeles." Anchor text links are very powerful and are a big piece of what helps a site to rank for certain phrases. I double-checked this for your specific site and there were indeed pages from other sites that were linking to your site with Los Angeles in the anchor text. Hope this helps! Best, Jill Share your comments and thoughts here. ++Ranking for Local Keywords – Part 2++ Hi Jill, My client has a local shop. Should every keyword phrase contain the locale, such as Denver, Arvada, Westminster, etc., and then just change up the item? For instance, do I need to say, "Denver keyword phrase 1," "Arvada keyword phrase 2," "Arvada keyword phrase 3," "Littleton Colorado keyword phrase 4," etc.? Thanks, Cara ++Jill's Response++ Hi Cara, No, you don't have to – nor should you – do that. If every keyword phrase contained the locale, the page would sound very silly and read very poorly, don't you think? List your locations somewhere on the page where it will make sense to your site visitors, as well as in the Title tags. This is usually enough to show up for the appropriate locations. Hope this helps! Best, Jill Share your comments and thoughts here. ++Linking to Low-Authority Sites++ Hi Jill, I just signed up for your newsletter, which looks good. I have a question for you: If websites have links pointing externally, is there a difference when pointing to high- or low-authority sites? Is it good to use the nofollow tag when pointing to low-priority sites so that link juice doesn't leak out to low-ranking sites, but okay to use the dofollow tags when pointing to high-authority sites? The sites that we point to are ALWAYS relevant material related to the link, but some of them are very small manufacturer sites with less PageRank and link juice than we have on our sites. Some of them don't do much Internet marketing and aren't held in high esteem in the eyes of the search engines, though they have all the specs for the products that we are linking to. Is it okay to follow them anyway, as long as the content is relevant? Thank you, Pam ++Jill's Response++ Hi Pam, As long as the URLs you're pointing to within your website are being pointed to for good reason – that is, you want your site visitors to have more information or a recommendation – then it's all good regardless of the perceived authority. Obviously, you wouldn't want to point your site visitors to junky sites, so there shouldn't be an issue as to whether you should nofollow the links or not. It's absolutely, positively 100% okay to follow them and point your visitors sites that don't have a high Google profile. How else will they ever become more of an authority? What if everyone thought it was bad and refused to link to a site that was helpful to their site visitors because they were worried about Google? It would completely throw off the natural balance of the Web and force Google into a new mode of determining a site's value. In addition, you should be aware that there's no such thing as a "dofollow tag." All links are followable links by their very nature unless they have the rel=nofollow attribute on them, or the page itself is set with a nofollow meta tag. Hope this helps! Best, Jill Share your comments and thoughts here. P.S. If anyone would like to republish any or all of the above Q&As please email me your request and where they will reside, and I'll send you a short bio you can use with it for your site.   Twitter Question of the Week ++Do you ever use nofollow...?++ This week's Twitter Question was: Do you ever use nofollow links, and if so, for what purpose? Here's how my Twitter followers responded: SEOSEM: Sometimes nofollow on About Us or Privacy links. netmeg: Yep, when I sell text ads on my sites. They are all nofollowed. Regular links are left alone. kokopoko2: For those privacy policy pages, etc. Stuff that doesn't need to be indexed. DonnaFontenot: Yes, for affiliate links, cuz Google whacked my TBPR long ago to show disapproval. No reason not to for aff. links anyway. It's possible that G thought some of my afflinks were really paid links, so NF'ing the rest may be unnecessary but I use caution. Axemedia: I still have some small sites on which I've not gotten around to undoing the old nofollow siloing. MCIMaui: If you're concerned about duplicate content, such as a print page, putting nofollow into play can be a big help. Jill's Response: Hmm...not too sure about MCIMaui's response. Nofollow is not at all a "noindex" tag. It just tells Google not to pass link popularity to the page linked to. I would definitely not recommend using it as a way to stop duplicate content issues, because I believe you'd be sorely disappointed in the results. And it also doesn't make sense to me to use nofollow on Privacy Policy links. I'm happy to pass link juice to those pages because they all link back to my important pages and pass their own link juice to them. I mostly just use the nofollow attribute on blog comments. And I've experimented with adding it to links that have generic anchor text such as "click here" when there's already a more descriptive anchor text link somewhere else on the page. But I have no idea if it actually makes a difference in that situation or not. I figure it can't hurt! Want to participate in the Twitter Question of the Week? Follow @jillwhalen on Twitter Share your comments and thoughts here.   Advanced Forum Thread of the Week ++Load Speed – Affecting SEO?++ Forum member "tyggis" asks: Did any of you experience that faster load speed of pages got you better rankings at Google SERP? See how other forum members answered, and/or leave your own response here: Load Speed – Affecting SEO?   Advisor Wrap-up That's all for today! On the home front, my son Tim is wrapping up his junior year of high school, which is hard to believe. Seems like just yesterday he was graduating from the Montessori school! He's got a lot on his plate between studying for finals, the SAT2, research papers, getting inducted into the National Honor Society, a year-end performance of the Improv club he co-founded and teaches, the Junior Prom...whew...I'm tired just typing all that. As you can imagine, he's looking forward to summer. He's hoping to have time to program another computer game. (Long-time readers may remember playing his 2008 game.) It's also been somewhat busy for me the past few weeks. Last week I served on a jury, which turned out to be an interesting experience. I've moved out of my office of 3+, years which was a bit of an undertaking. If anyone in the MA area needs some desks, tables, chairs, printers, or the like, please let me know! I'm working on a talk for SEMNE in July that I'm calling "Responsible Search Marketing." This should be interesting for me (and hopefully the audience) because it's a first for me to do a talk that's less about teaching SEO and more of an inspirational keynote speech. At least that's my goal. SEMNE is a good place for me to experiment with something new because it's usually a crowd of friendly faces. You can learn more about the event and register for it here. Catch you in 2 weeks! – Jill Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, an SEO Consulting Agency in Boston, MA.   Today's issue is also available online in the newsletter archives. If you prefer RSS/XML please feel free to use our newsfeed here. Feel free to forward this email in its entirety to anyone you feel might be interested in it. Paid sponsor ads are clearly marked as advertisements and neither High Rankings nor Jill Whalen take any responsibility for the claims made within these ads, nor the websites they point to. Paid ads do not constitute an endorsement for the products, services or companies advertising in the newsletter. Please visit our sponsors and use your own due diligence for any purchases you make on the Internet.	Need Ongoing SEO Help? Check out our Services! Get the SEO help you need from an experienced, trusted SEO advisor. Click Here to Learn More About Our SEO Services Now   Written SEO Evaluation for YOUR Website - Only $600 Looking to have your website reviewed by hand for SEO pitfalls that may be preventing it from receiving the search engine traffic it deserves? What you'll receive: Jill Whalen will personally review your website for SEO problems preventing you from receiving all the targeted traffic you deserve. An emailed report written by Jill of the issues she found. Answers via email to any questions about the review. Learn which tasks will provide you with the biggest bang for your buck and stop missing out on highly targeted opportunities and sales. This is NOT an auto-generated SEO report! Request Your SEO Website Review Now!
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