Lately I have been on sitepoint looking over the forums and seeing some big time debate about some common SEO myths out there. I think it would be a great idea to test some out on here to see if they really work or if they are really myths. But before I start testing I need your guys help on setting up some guidelines on the tests, please use the comments below to suggest some rules and guidelines for my tests so the results are fair for everyone.
I’m thinking I should test out the 3 big ones I seem to always debate about, which are:
1. Nofollow Tag
2. Keyword Real Estate
3. Google Loving Wordpress CMS
Lets go a little more in depth:
1. NoFollow Tag
Google says it doesn’t pass any weight, so people believe it. Well is it true? Does making a link rel=”nofollow” mean that google wont pass any weight to the linked website? nofollow means “don’t follow this link” to the google spiders…but do they listen?
2. Keyword Real Estate
Some people call this quote “A worthless backlinks”. But is it really? I use keyword real estate a lot and get great results. The whole debate lies in whether or not subdomains and/or subpages of a trusted websites (such as digg or squidoo) actually pass weight and spiders on. And does it really help in getting your site ranked for those completive keywords?
3. Goes Google Love The Wordpress CMS
This one is gonna be tough to test, but Ill try. This also falls under the blogger CMS. I use the wordpress CMS on most of my websites because I personally think that google likes the wordpress blog CMS, but does the big G really like a certain CMS over other CMS’s? We will find out 
Ok, now the tough part, actually testing this shit out. But we need some rules and guidelines for this, so here is what I’m thinking:
Nofollow Tag
- Buy A New Domain
- Link to the website only from 5 different websites using the nofollow tag
See if it gets the page to rank/indexed
Keyword Real Estate
- Buy A New Domain
- Link to the website from 3 different social sites (digg, squidoo, blogger)
See if it gets the page to rank/indexed
Google Lovin Wordpress
- Buy 2 New Domains
- Put a default wordpress site with unquie content up
- Put a custom made site with unquie content up
See which one ranks better
Now with the Wordpress one, I need to find out where I will get the links from? It has to be the same niche for both sites, so should I get the same links from the same site? So there will be 2 links with the same keyword on each site?
I also need you guys to suggest some keywords to test, such as “jonwaraas seomyths” or an actual keyword like “seo myths explained”.
Please post your suggestions in the comment below, I need your guys’ help with the rules and guidelines and some keywords to use so this can be a fair public seo my test.
Also, to talk about the debate a little bit more, You can see me debate with the SEO Guro stymiee about the wordpress CMS and using Squidoo for backlinks. You can read up on those two blog posts to learn about where we all stand on those issues.
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3 Comments
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Regarding the Wordpress platform, it is indeed a solid foundation for your SEO efforts (of course, improvements such as a title plugin and one for avoiding duplicate content are in order), and, as such, the job of securing good rankings for a Wordpress blog is made easier as far as on-page SEO is concerned.
Regarding your experiment, if you were to take a Wordpress blog, implement plugins such as those I was referring to on the one hand, and have a site custom made on the other (of course, on-page SEO needs to be taken into consideration with the custom made one as well) then, under identical off-page circumstances there shouldn’t be any huge differences as far as rankings are concerned (again, if title tags and other on-page aspects are implemented correctly with the custom made website as well).
Alan Johnson
I’m going to see if I can get a new domain indexed with only nofollow links. I’ve heard both, they do pass weight and they don’t pass weight. Just been to lazy to see for myself.
I’m really curious to see the outcome of the nofollow test and the keyword realestate. I think that in both cases, they both have positive effect on websites. Keep us up to date on it though.