The effects of linking to a bad quality site can be disastrous to any website’s organic rankings.

While we’ve made every effort to carefully vet each and every link in each and every comment posted on our site, what we cannot do is continuously monitor the status of the sites these comments link to.

Unfortunately, sites go down, get hacked, turn rogue and change direction all too often. As a result, what was once a good site to link to can turn into a very negative proposition if it gets hacked or turns rogue and starts spamming users or hosting viruses (viri?).

This latter scenario is not just bad for our search rankings but also for any users on our site who happen to click through and visit these rogue sites.

Hence, our decision: from today, all links in comments will include the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

We hope that our genuine readers and commenters will see agree with our reasons and will not be deterred from commenting and interacting with us in the future!

Rel=”nofollow” is an attribute that webmasters can add within the code for external links in order to signal that the link should not be followed by the search engine spiders. Bloggers often use the attribute to disuade comment spam.

The nofollow trend on Twitter started last year when they first indicated to search spiders that links posted under Web, on the right hand side of the Twitter profile, were not to be trusted. They then extended that to links within the Bio as well.

Now, Twitter adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links, be it links referencing an article or links to third-party Twitter apps that enabled posting the tweet.

Internal links remain untouched, turning Twitter into a walled garden much like Wikipedia, with lots of link juice coming in from other sites but none going out.

As Rae Hoffman pointed out on her blog, all the content on Twitter is created by the profile owners. Twitter is robbing profile owners by disallowing them to reap any benefit from their own work.

Twitter is likely to see some backlash as a result of this decision. Their justification for their decision is that it disuades spammers from abusing the service. However, Twitter is quite good at stopping spammer accounts already. And, moreover, that doesn’t then explain why verified reliable accounts such as @Google and @stephenfry also have their links nofollowed.

The popular micro-blogging service has timed these updates quite well. They are now so big, that minor backlashes and disenssion among SEO, social marketers and developers would hardly affect their growth, which is now self-propelling.

Hubspot conducted the survey across 1,531 of their customers, most of them being small or medium sized business. Of these 1,531 companies 795 of them used blogs, while the remaining 736 did not do so. The results showed that the companies that used blogs definitely had better search marketing results than those that did not.

While the companies that used blogs received 55% more visitors or traffic to there sites, they also received 97% more inbound links and an astounding 434% more indexed pages.

In most cases, the more visitors a business receives, the more sales they are eventually likely to make.

Link building, which is usually considered to be the most difficult part of search engine optimisation, is also made much easier through the use of blogs. The fact that 97% more links can be obtained through the use of blogs is significant enough to justify blogging for any business.

It is also very important to have as many indexed pages as possible, as that will increase the chances of a site being ranked higher, and thus appear on the first page of Google’s search results. This means that in all, maintaining a blog makes the likelihood of clients finding a business through search much higher.

The study was carried out by Technorati asked bloggers to list the sources they refer to the most for information. While 61 percent of bloggers surveyed said they referred to other blogs, 46 percent said they were influenced by the mainstream media sites.

Credibility is an important quality for blogs, and it often decides the number of links a blog receives.  If a blogger is found to be writing untrue and baseless posts, eventually other bloggers will stop linking to that blog. On the other hand, if true and relevant material is published on a blog, more and more bloggers will link in to that blog, thus bestowing more power and authority on that blog.

Based on the results of their study, Technorati has created the ‘Technorati Attention Index’, rating the top 50 mainstream media sites that were linked to by bloggers in the past month. The index will be updated every month.

The top 5 sites this month are:

• YouTube
• The New York Times
• BBC News
• CNN.com
• MSN

In comparison, Techmeme’s Leaderboard rates the following  as the top five non-blog sources for bloggers:

• CNET News
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• Reuters
• Computerworld

The complete list of top fifty sites rated by Technorati is available here.

Yahoo! is the current search leader in Japan. Google Japan started featuring “Hot Keywords” on their homepage last month. This was done with the intention of guiding users to other related sites such as Google Maps, Google News, Gmail and YouTube, which they hoped would improve the user experience and get more users to access the site.

Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog reported last week that Google Japan hired Cyberbuzz, a company that specialises in online marketing to sponsor blog posts through a pay-per-post service to inform users about these new features and associated Google products.

Paying bloggers for links is against the policies of Google. Since Google Japan had to pay the online marketing company for the blog posts, they have broken one of their own company’s rules.

Google Japan has not only discontinued the services of Cyberbuzz, but has also issued an apology on the Google Japan blog, The translated post says:

“Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products. It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologise to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.”

The “Hot New Keywords” feature has also been removed since then and Matt Cutts confirmed that Google dropped the page rank of Google Japan from 9 to 5 and it will likely stay that way for a while!

Responding to a post on the Google Webmaster Help forum, John Mueller stated, “In general, I would like to add that no, backlinks from .EDU domains generally do not get additional credibility from Google.”

SEO professionals starting paying more attention to links from .edu and .gov domains after Google’s update nicknamed Jagger, where reciprocal links were devalued and more importance was paid to links from sites having greater authority. Educational institutions are usually very choosy about whom they agree to link with. Websites of well known colleges and universities also typically have higher PageRank. The conclusion that such a link would be more valuable is therefore not really far-fetched.

A link from a .edu or .gov site is neither easily available free of cost nor through payment. These websites link only to extremely relevant and trustworthy sites or other equally popular sites. Immaterial of whether the domain extension of such a site is .edu or .com, it fits the bill for a good quality, desirable site to get a link from.

Back in April 2006, a post on High Rankings Forum asked whether there was any evidence that having inbound .edu and .gov links was “better” and counted more than other links, to which forum moderator Jill Whalen answered with a simple “no”. It would seem though that Jill may have been in a minority here as many SEOs voiced their belief in the SEO goodness of .edu and .gov links on a post at SEO Roundtable.

There is no absolute proof that search engines do or do not consider .edu links to be more valuable. Even Google’s, John Mueller does not categorically deny the value of a .edu domain. All he says is that they “generally” do not get more credibility from Google. This does not mean that link from respectable universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale will not count for more. Though, the fact rests that there are a lot more good attributes associated with all of those university websites than just their .edu extension.