How Doing the Right Thing Might Cost You Your PageRank
Posted on 14. Dec, 2008 by Julius Kuhn-Regnier in Blogging, Internet Marketing, SEO
Most bloggers are not deceptive. But there are some that use mistakes of others to their advantage. In my opinion that person won’t stay a blogger much longer. I recently found out about a method people used to increase their PageRank.
I actually found out about this by one of these malicious bloggers visiting my site. The issue the person exploited revolves around the use of the “Top Commentators” plug-in. A lot of people have been using it on their blog to show appreciation towards bloggers commenting often.
Reason for My Research
Let’s first take a look at how I found out about it. I actually took a look at my blog stats and saw that one visitor searched for the following: inurl:organic seo “top commentators”
The Investigation
There are a few things you can take from this. First of all the visitor searched something very specific. What is inurl:organic seo? inurl is a specific Google operator. Google operators are there to modify your search and make it more accurate. For example you could use filetype:log inurl:icq to find .log files that contain the word icq. You can find a list of Google operators here.
Let’s go back to what the visitor was searching for. Because of our knowledge we can now assume that he was looking at web pages containing the keywords organic and seo. But he was further trying to find web sites that also included the exact words “top commentators”. We can assume that he was looking for blogs using the top commentators plugin.
It is also important to know that the visitor left a comment on my blog saying something like: seo refers to search engine optimization. I also visited his site and it was about search engine optimization.
Because I still wasn’t sure what the visitor was actually looking for I queried Google for the same search as the person visiting. These are the results.
If you visit some of these websites you will realize that our theory was right. All pages are related to SEO and include the Top Commentators plug-in. The question why the visitor searched for these web sites still wasn’t clear. After looking at the source code of the Top Commentators plug-in on one website it became clear to me.
Do you see it?
The Trick
There is no rel=”nofollow” which means that the commentators gain part of the PageRank of this web site. I am certain that this was what the visitor was trying to find. He was increasing his PageRank through writing a comment that led him to being listed in the Top Commentators list.
Most of these blog owners probably do not even know that rel=”nofollow” is not activated in the plug-in. The reason for this is that the plug-in by default has nofollow turned off.
The Solution
If you want to add rel=”nofollow” to the Top Commentators plug-in just go into your administration section of Wordpress. Click on Appearance -> Widgets and select the sidebar to which you have added the Top Commentators plug-in. There click Edit on the Top Commentators widget and set NoFollow each name if hyperlinked? to Yes. Then just save the changes and you are done ;)
Feel free to ask me any questions. Do you want to know more about how to use Google operators?
If you enjoyed the article, please consider sharing it!
7 Responses to “How Doing the Right Thing Might Cost You Your PageRank”
Kathy - Virtual Impax
14. Dec, 2008
This is my favorite kind of post – and the kind of post that “earns” my RSS subscription!! This is very informative and VERY valuable!!!
Drew Stauffer
14. Dec, 2008
If you don’t want to let go of any page rank then you should definitely turn off rel=”nofollow”.
I personally like to leave it on to give my commentors a little extra incentive to leave comments. It’s hard enough to get people to leave useful comments.
My comments have drastically increased since I added the plugin and I think it’s because of the added page rank increase when you comment on my blog.
I would gladly release a little page rank for more quality comments :)
Will
14. Dec, 2008
A few questions:
If the person doing this “exploit” does not leave enough comments to make the top commentator list, then this is not a problem?
Even if they do make the list, how does this adversely affect your own site?
Isn’t one of the main benefits given to people making the list, the fact that their lik is dofollow? By making the links nofollow, won’t I be defeating one of the main rewards given to my top commentators?
Thanks for your research on this and for you answers to my questions!
Julius Kuhn-Regnier
14. Dec, 2008
@Kathy – Thanks for subscribing. I am glad that this article is valuable to you
@Drew – Yeah I agree. It might be good to have it set to dofollow and it will definitely increase the number of comments but I think most people do not even realize that nofollow is turned off. I actually think the quality of your comments is related to the topic of your blog and how you write. Take a look at Copyblogger.com they only get quality comments.
@Will – No it shouldn’t be a problem if they do not get to the top of the list. Search engine list websites also based on the number of outbound links. Further they look if the outbound link points to a site related to yours and if it is a quality website. If the website is unrelated and of bad quality it will hurt your ranking on search engines.
It is true, if you want to reward your commentators then you can leave it set to dofollow. But even with nofollow you show appreciation towards your readers because it generates traffic to their website because of the link.
Sunday Search of the Week 12-14-2008 | Healthy Living
15. Dec, 2008
[...] devious reason for these searches. I was contacted by someone researching this and went to their web site to read what they found. At first I thought my search stats were not related as the people doing the search never left [...]
Secret service weapons
04. May, 2009
I was just wondering…
I’d like to boost the PR of my site, where could I go to do this? Any websites that offer a service like this for an affordable price?
jules
04. May, 2009
Text-Link-Ads is a good place to get a boost in PR but be careful not to over do it.
Probably the best way to increase your PageRank is to just create useful content ;)