It is amazing how powerful a blog can be. Not only for SEO; yes it can help you gain rankings if used correctly; it can also get your point across and cause change.
The WTF SEO Blog has been going for a few months now; albeit left for long periods of time while I was helping out a client who had every conceivable Google penalty under the Sun. Not my doing, mind and now corrected!
Yet three of these posts have led to change; big changes as well!
Firstly I do a lot of Travel SEO and in the post “Robots Block the Selling of Cheap Cruises”; I pointed out that a couple of companies were not using their robots.txt file correctly. One company changed theirs and now sit on page one for Cheap Cruises.
Then there was the post “Why You Should Not Try & Game Google;” OK; maybe I am cheating here as it pointed to another blog of mine called “Totally Bollocks” where I laid out my thoughts about why I felt a Portsmouth based SEO company appeared to be doing this. Google subsequently kicked them out of Google maps for terms associated with SEO Portsmouth.
Finally and if they do what they say they are going to do… a big one; Feefo have stated on their blog; in a post entitled “Google and No Follow Links – an FAQ from Feefo” that they are going to turn all the review links to nofollow after I pointed out the issue in my post “Are Feefo Links, Paid for Links?” Small update; Feefo have made changes to their website and I can’t be bothered to hunt for the post, hence no link to it!
However in their post they state “As a Google Licensed Content Partner, we work very closely with Google in their aim of improving the quality and consistency of search results for consumers.” No mention of me; yet it is amazing that my post led to an email exchange with the head of marketing at Feefo.
Also note the date of their post; 27th August 2014; two weeks after my post…I have a screenshot should they try and change the post date to try and discredit me…though I think they are a trustworthy company and so won’t.
One thing I did notice in their post was the option to allow companies to keep the full follow links in place; it looks like most are doing this…well I do hope that Google doesn’t hit them. Personally I would have nofollow as these will still send Google to my site…and no chance of a hit.
While I am on about Feefo; two things; they are local to me and I would gladly consult with them for no fee; as is my new policy and they may want to change their post a little… They are mentioning the wrong animal…it is Penguin that is likely to bite them for using follow links. Panda could well hurt them due to lots of user generated; thin and often duplicated content; but that’s another story.
Although I haven’t really focused on the SEO side of things; any SEO can see that having a blog is a powerful tool.