Alan Rabinowitz got started doing SEO in the early days of Google and he is the CEO of a company named SEO Image. He got started when he was trying to figure out how he can get his art web site to rank well in the search engines. He actually read a lot of the tutorials from Jill Whalen and Bruce Clay in the early days of SEO.
We briefly talked about content vs links and how back in the old days, links were king but now content is king. But content that gets links are where you do very well these days. We Also chatter a bit about the early days of the conferences, so meeting various personalities from there. His company’s core focus is with SEO and online reputation management (ORM). We briefly talked about the impact of COVID-19 on his business and how it varies by different industries and how businesses are adapting.
Are Nofollowed Links Counted By Google?
We then began a deeper discussion on links, specifically the nofollow attribute and if it matters. He basically said that nofollowed links do pass signals and have for a while. He blamed Google for removing value with links with the nofollow and because of that, Google had to backtrack from it. He just does not think nofollow makes any difference to rankings these days. He said rel sponsored and rel ugc has just not took off and very few add those attributes to their links. In short, he feels there is more to the story than what Google is telling us around nofollow. Heck, he even said affiliate links are also counted into the algorithm.
We then briefly chatted about how the old ways of linking were totally fine and now it is considered black hat. We talked about how Google handles bad links now versus the old days.
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
