Thursday, July 5, 2012

You can get your social media profile weight still if its "no follow"

How does nofollow work with the Social Graph API (rel="nofollow me")?

If you host user profiles and allow users to link to other profiles on the web, we encourage you to mark those links with the rel="me" microformat so that they can be made available through the Social Graph API. For example:

<a href="http://blog.example.com" rel="me">My blog</a>

However, because these links are user-generated and may sometimes point to untrusted pages, we recommend that these links be marked with nofollow. For example:

<a href="http://blog.example.com" rel="me nofollow">My blog</a>

With rel="me nofollow", Google will continue to treat the rel="nofollow" as expected for search purposes, such as not transferring PageRank. However, for the Social Graph API, we will count the rel="me" link even when included with a nofollow.

If you are able to verify ownership of a link using an identity technology such as OpenID or OAuth, however, you may choose to remove the nofollow link.

To prevent crawling of a rel="me nofollow" URL, you can use robots.txt. Standard robots.txt exclusion rules are respected by both Googlebot and the Social Graph API.

However, you can be superstitious about the following best practice in using these relationship attribute:

rel="me"

Google now uses reciprocal link juice dumping factor. So, reciprocal links don't get the usual link juice for SEO. So, many people think that using rel="me" can save them, if they link from multiple sites that they own. This tag can be used for similar and related contents also.

rel="friend"

You can define a link as friend, which might have separate influence on the link when search engines plans to utilize the relationship. Without login, if you go to your public profile in Facebook, then you will see that your friends' profiles are linked with the rel="friend" tag. If your content is dependent on the contents of other links (e.g. if you are reviewing a post), then you can use the tag.

rel="external"

This tells the search engine that the link is not a "friend" nor "me". i.e. just a typical stranger. So, this might have different value in the eye of search engine. But, let me remind you that this is still a superstition.

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