SEO Advice

It was announced earlier this week that Wikipedia has put in place the nofollow tag for all external links in the Wikipedia web site. We did a quick check and yes, the announcement appears to be implemented. Apparantly it was done to combat black hat SEOs who were spamming the directory in order to boost link popularity by placing a link to their web site in related articles on Wikipedia. Bottom line, Wikipedia articles will no longer affect the number of backlinks to your web site and thus will not help you in the ongoing struggle of web site search engine rankings.

During my normal Monday morning surf-a-round I found a great post at TLA that discusses the dreaded Google sandbox and how to climb / crawl / punch your way out of it. As you may have guessed, the article focuses on building trust with backlinks from authority sites, blogs or other sites that you can beg, steal, or cheat your way to getting a link. There is also some good discussion on link baiting; overall a good read.