I was just doing a little reading and stumbled on this post: http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-profiles-seo-as-criminals/

Just because people want to get traffic to their website, they’re most definitely criminals. I mean, legitimate people don’t want anyone to actually read what they write These guys using permalinks on their blog and optimizing for keywords in their post are all criminals. Oh yes and building links with the keyword in the anchor text is also criminal activity

This really doesn’t surprise me coming from Google. In a way, I see where they’re coming from, there is a lot of garbage at the top of the search engine results for some keywords and buried down deep is really great content that barely anyone finds. Highly popular websites or websites that exercise SEO rank at the top, that’s just the way it is. Doesn’t mean they have the best content, just means they have the best SEO.

So yea, if you want to get your content read by people you HAVE to exercise SEO. That’s just the way it is. I sort of wonder what would happen if no one bothered with SEO, what sites would get to the top? Most likely just the popular sites, ones with a large following since they would (and do) get plenty of backlinks for every post they write.

Personally, I exercise a very limited amount of SEO on this site since I’m not worried about traffic. I’m just sort of letting this one go naturally. The Google algorithm is probably the strangest thing I’ve ever encountered though, with pagerank, google dancing, keywords, backlinks, the “google sandbox”, etc. It’s all in good fun though

Side Note: You may have noticed I’ve thrown out nofollow linking, I’m just going to keep links in plain text for right now or dofollow when I feel that page is worthy or needs to receive a link. I am thinking about removing website URL from the comments as well, but I’m not sure yet.

You know how nofollow links do not pass PR but also don’t devaluate links on the page? Well that is not true anymore. Now when you have a bunch of nofollow links, the nofollow links still absorb PR and devalue the dofollow links! What happens to the PR? Well, it sort of just vanishes. So if you have 96 comments on a blog post and 4 dofollow links within the post, those dofollow links no longer receive 1/4 of the pages PR per link, they now receive 1/100 of the pages PR.

So in a sense all those links are consuming PR without passing it on! This is really not good for blogs. You might as well make everything dofollow because it won’t make a difference. I can see some blogs disabling the use of posting your site url in the comments, or just making all comments dofollow. I’m not going to change anything personally since I don’t get a ton of comments

Oh yea, and I wouldn’t bother with PR sculpting anymore, with these changes I don’t see how it would make a difference. PR sculpting is basically making some links on your page to other pages on your site nofollow and thus making the links to other pages stronger to make them rank higher, if you didn’t know already.

This is one of my sites where I am far from an SEO nazi. I am on some of my other sites though On a side note, any of you check out bing.com? MSN’s new search engine? It’s pretty neat. I sort of liked the name Kumo better, but that’s their decision

References

http://searchenginewatch.com/3633972