Tag Archive - Video

Youtube Removes Nofollow

November 8, 2009 in Blog, SEO with 3 Comments

Back in March I added a video on my test video blog regarding the overuse of the ‘nofollow’ tag by social media sites. Just to recap, the ‘nofollow’ tag is a way to link to another site without passing Pagerank. If the ‘nofollow’ tag is used on a link then Google doesn’t use that link in it’s link graph.

There are basically two uses of the ‘nofollow’ tag, firstly to stop sending Pagerank to pages you don’t want Google to value, such as login pages and privacy (although this has now slightly changed, see below) and secondly to stop Pagerank being passed to sites you don’t vouch for. If you want a better understanding check out this post on Search Engine Journal.

The first point (using nofollow on internal pages) was somewhat overused as SEO practitioners used this to ‘sculpt’ Pagerank (PR) within their site. If they had a page with PR5 and it has 10 links on the page they could use ‘nofollow’ on 9 of them and squeeze as much PR to the remaining link.

However, Google decided to stop this practice and now the PR is still divided by the number of links on the page, even if some are nofollow’d, a better explanation of this can be found here by Matt Cutts (Google).

Back in March my argument was that Social Media sites should not use the ‘nofollow’ tag on links to your blog from your profile page, it’s your profile page and you can vouch for the blog. Some sites weren’t using ‘nofollow’, best known would be LinkedIn, but some did, including Twitter and Youtube.

This meant that my Youtube profile had a link to my video blog that was nofollow’d. This for me isn’t a fair use of the tag, thousands of people link to their social media profiles, passing pagerank to those sites and get nothing back in return, my Twitter page is PR5.

Now Youtube have removed the nofollow tag, links to your website from your profile page now pass Pagerank. This brings a whole new perspective to how you utilise your Youtube channel. For instance I’m subscribed to my friends channel at Youtube, his profile page is PR3, because I’m subscribed my profile is linked from his, in turn my profile is linked to my video blog. Pagerank starts to get passed on because the links mentioned are all followed.

Youtube Removes Nofollow

Youtube Removes Nofollow

This means that Youtube has stopped being a passive part of link building/SEO and moved into a direct contributor to your link profile. The down side could be if this gets abused.

For me it’s really pleasing to see a Google web property leading the way, my question is of course when will Twitter follow?

Why you should use video on your site

May 3, 2009 in Search Engine Optimisation, Search Marketing, SEO with 0 Comments

One thing I’ve learnt running this video blog is that video can have a huge impact on your search results.

Taking into account velocity, the speed at which a new article can rank in results due to its freshness and universal search, the blending of video, images, news etc into web results you can easily dominate a keyword.

This blog is just a few weeks old but already I’m seeing the effects, take this key term “oprah twitter episode” this is the results page.

Oprah twitter episode key term

Oprah twitter episode key term

I have 3 results on the first page, admittedly it’s not a competitive keyword, but getting 3 positions is pretty good going.

For “Twitter, Ashton Kutcher, CNN and Oprah” I grab the places just below Techcrunch

twitter ashton kutcher cnn and oprah

twitter ashton kutcher cnn and oprah

The page/blog doesn’t have any real authority but is piggy backing on the video sites, not only that, the results become much more noticeable.

So, if you aren’t using video or you aren’t optimising your videos then you could be missing a big opportunity.

40 Percent of Mobile search from 200 Keywords

March 19, 2009 in Mobile Search, Podcast, SEO with 0 Comments

I was speaking at the IAB Engage for Search conference on Tuesday and one statistic that stood out for me was from Charles Sword (Head of Mobile Advertising Yahoo). It was

40 Percent of Mobile search comes from just 200 Keywords

Here’s my take on it in my latest podcast.

I wasn’t just sat on stage…

iGary at IAB Engage for Search

iGary at IAB Engage for Search

But, I was also Twittering the event, when I sent out the stat that just 200 keywords make up 40% of search on mobile phones it started a conversation instantly.

Twitter IAB

Twitter IAB

To fill in some other stats

  • Smartphones account for 12% of the market
  • The iPhone 3%
  • Over 30% of mobile search is from smartphones

Charles commented that although th hardware limits what you want to type in the driving force is behavioural, we use mobile search when we are out and about, such as food, movies etc.

Mobile Search Stats from Yahoo!

March 17, 2009 in Mobile Search, Podcast, Search Marketing, SEO with 0 Comments

I was speaking at the IAB conference today and an interesting stat from Yahoo! Just 200 keywords account for over 40% of all searches on mobile phones here in the UK.

Will update late with more detailed stats. In the meantime here is a snippet from my talk on SEO.

Hello world!

March 6, 2009 in music with 0 Comments

Just a quick post to introduce a friend of mine, Ilya Lagutenko, who is the frontman for Mumiy Troll, they’ve just finished a USA tour and are releasing an English album in April, so watch out world!