Mixxing with a Dash of NoFollow
Thanks for visiting! If you like what you read, subscribe to our weekly articles via email alerts or subscribe to our RSS feed Also you can follow us on Twitter !
When I first started using Mixx, none of the links on the site had the NoFollow attribute applied to them. However, several weeks ago, I had the “Highlight NoFollow Links” option enabled on my SearchStatus add-on for Firefox as I was using Mixx, and I noticed that all of the links on my profile page were NoFollowed (as seen in the screenshot below):
This observation piqued my curiosity, so I decided to check out the Mixx Popular Stories page. When I saw that the Popular Stories did not have the NoFollow attribute applied to them, I initially assumed that Mixx had taken a page out of Digg’s playbook. However, a little bit of additional research revealed that this wasn’t the case.
Two months ago, daveuk submitted this story to Mixx: twitition – Mixx should remove the nofollow tag from links to popular stories. As explained in the twitition:
“About 3 weeks ago social news website Mixx.com started nofollowing all of their outbound links. I understand why they have done it (spammers, no editorial control etc.), but IMO stories that get chosen by the community to be promoted should get link juice – They should use the same setup Sphinn.com uses, only stories that get promoted receive link juice. Mixx has built up all of its PageRank from bloggers linking to it, it’s only fair that we get something back. If Digg did this people would play hell, Mixx does it and nobody bats an eyelid? Come on people lets send @ChrisMcGill a message that this is not OK. Sign to make sure that great web content gets the credit it deserves.”
This story generated a lot of discussion on Mixx (252 comments to be exact), and as a result, Kerry (who is Mixx’s Vice President of Products and Marketing) eventually gave a full explanation of the situation:
“Excerpt: Here is the deal. Google put us in a penalty box with no warning. Some of you might have noticed the Mixx story pages prettyuch disappeared from SERPs. Some of u did notice and asked about it. And we responded honestly to those who asked that basically Google made our story pages have a PR of zero.”
Later in the discussion thread, people started to notice that Mixx had updated their policy to remove the NoFollow attribute from the Popular Stories. So, instead of simply copying Digg, Mixx actually NoFollowed all of their links in response to a penalty from Google, and then implemented this new policy in response to feedback from the Mixx community. I found this to be interesting, because it shows Google is getting serious about controlling social spam and isn’t afraid to hand out penalties, even when its to a well-established site like Mixx.
Now, what makes this story really interesting is that Mixx is still NoFollowing some of the stories that make it to the Popular page, as you can see from the screenshot below:
While Digg applies the NoFollow attribute to all sponsored stories that are on the homepage, I can’t figure out the reasoning behind Mixx’s application of the NoFollow attribute to certain popular stories. For example, as you can see in the screenshot above, a charity story published on Zagat.com (which is a company that has been around since 1979) is NoFollowed.
Since I haven’t been able to discover how Mixx decides which Popular stories should be NoFollowed, if you have any information on this subject, be sure to share it with me below!
Similar Posts:
- Digg Says Goodbye to Shouts, Hello to Facebook and Twitter
- Is the New DiggBar Pure Evil?
- 10 Sure-Fire Ways to Get Banned from Digg
- Louie Baur:How To Be a Power Digger
- Social Voting Madness! (Reader Poll Included)
Tags: links, SEO, Social Media
Hesham @ FamousBl...
Bhavya
Brian
Carter Cole
Claire Jarrett
It kind of makes sense, but it’s interesting that Google is taking the time to go through the social bookmarking websites one-by-one like that.
David Leonhardt´s last blog ..Look who follows NoFollow links!
on sites like mixx they make their revenue from the shared content. if the content creator (and the person sharing the content) doesn’t get link credit for being on mixx, digg, or wherever it isn’t fair and in the long run will kill the model imo.
also, I doubt google did this one off. more likely the # of spam pages from mixx (in googles terms) set off a flag and the level of trust was dropped.
The SEO community only has itself to blame for the trend sweeping the social media sites. Most people don’t need as many links as they have been led to believe by bad SEO advice, so the link feeding frenzy that has populated social media resources with low-quality content has made a very nice footprint for search engine filters to latch on to.
People have to stop blaming the email search spammers for all these social media nofollow shutdowns. It’s not the evil search spammers who are the problem. It’s EVERYONE who thinks social media is an easy source of links.
If you don’t treat your resources with respect, don’t expect the search engines to respect them, either.
SEO bloggers especially should think about the consequences of what they are doing the next time they want to publish a “20 great places to get DoFollow Links” article.
You’re not just hurting the people who run the social media site — you’re ultimately hurting yourself.
Michael Martinez´s last blog ..The Laws of SEO – How The Searchable Web EcoSystem Works
“Most people don’t need as many links as they have been led to believe by bad SEO advice”
This surprises me hearing this come from another SEO. Quality trustworthy incoming links from a variety of sources absolutely is what SEO is all about. Saying this isn’t important is the definition of bad SEO advice.
I’m just sayin.
I hadn’t even thought about the consequences- your right, it encourages all sites to be no follow.
I sometimes wonder in nofollows don’t actually help you in the ranks, at all, as it seems that they still monitor the amount of no follows there are.
Back to the subject matter at hand, I do think its a matter of User satisfaction. I don’t think those type of sites are set up to reward people with good SEO. I doubt many will rebel- these kind of sites are for the users, not the submitters. If the submitters switch to the users, we might actually be able to avoid a lot of useless links. On the other hand, more pages with arrested development pictures will be the highest rank.
jesse dictor´s last blog ..5 methods to optimize social media
Jesse,
I’m not really sure I understand what you are saying. As I see it the users are also the submitters (the ones supplying the content)
My point is simple, if users (submitters) take the time to create great content and then also take their time to share it with the mixx community, they should also receive the recognition. Meaning that they deserve the link to be followed. Mixx is a relatively low traffic site, so even if a piece of content goes popular, it’s not really that big of a deal. The follow link is some incentive for content providers to participate in the Mixx community. Of course there is still the issue of spam i.e. someone submitting something that is not very interesting in order to get a quick back link. OK this is going to exist on all social platforms regardless of whether links are followed or not. You see it in blog spam all the time. Just about every blogger has askimet but you still see ridiculous comments like. Great post thanks a lot etc. The best defense against this type of comment spam is in my opinion active moderation. Penalizing active users that contribute to the community because of a few spammers (in my opinion) is not the solution.
jesse dictor: “I sometimes wonder in nofollows don’t actually help you in the ranks, at all, as it seems that they still monitor the amount of no follows there are.”
Michael: Matt Cutts explained that Google stripped pages using “rel=’nofollow’” for PageRank sculpting of their nofollowed PageRank precisely because it was NOT helping sites in the search results to use “nofollow” on internal links.
Whether it might help a site to “nofollow” external links is another matter, but I doubt it. The only help I can see is that it prevents you from tripping filters that see you linking to the wrong sites.
However, it might be worth a test to see what happens. I’ll have to give that some thought, as I’m not sure it would be worth the trouble.
Michael Martinez´s last blog ..The Laws of SEO – How The Searchable Web EcoSystem Works
I am a strong believer that “nofollow” links on all your links can cause more harm than good. Big names like Digg and Wikipedia need not worry as “nofollow” plays a very small role in their organic results, they have plenty of inbound links so should not be worried about no follows at all. If you are not a big brand site then it is best you do not copy their practices as they are in a different ball park all together. Big brands can get away with a lot of stuff the little guys can’t.
Bryan Casson´s last blog ..Adwords Management Should be Transparent
I think Bryan hit the nail on the head. Big sites will millions of inbound links can do a lot of different things.
I won’t be surprised if more sites end up going the same route.
Matt´s last blog ..How The Merger Of Bing And Yahoo Will Affect Seo Posted By: Diane Forster
seriously i do not understand the coding-logic behind the fact that some articles on the MIXX homepage are nofollow and some are…
i would like to have the answer for this !
My thoughts exactly. Some clarification would be nice. I emailed Mixx asking for an explanation and haven’t received a reply. I’ll post it here if they they ever answer.
Won’t there be other sites to migrate to? Just seems like there is too much competition in social medias to get stuck to one site… there is another ‘hot’ one just around the corner.
Ok, I know this is going to come off sounding a little bit idealistic, and maybe even naive, but …
When it comes to social media, shouldn’t the “reward” actually be in the form of direct traffic?
… then if the content is truly useful, isn’t it likely to also gain additional “natural” links as a consequence of enough people reading it?
Let’s be honest here, even the stories that become “popular” on most social media sites aren’t necessarily their because of their editorial value. Why should someone who knows how to game the system be rewarded with link juice?
Just wondering?
Todd Morris´s last blog ..An Easy Way To Reward Only Your Blogging Friends With DoFollow Comment Links
On a site like Mixx the traffic you get from being promoted to the home page is really quite small. For me to spend any amount of time on a specific platform I have to weight out the benefits vs the time spent there. While a Digg home page might get 10,000 or 20,000 views if it’s hit good. A Mixx home page is lucky to get 100 views if it hits good.
Rewards don’t have to be one or the other, either traffic or followed links. Rewards can be whatever each users considers a reward (benefit). I can easily overlook the fact that a Mixx home page sends very little traffic, if there are some additional benefits. As for me I’m not saying I’ll stop using Mixx entirely because of the no follow change, but taking away the follow link does make the site less valuable/attractive to me as well as many other content providers (users).
I was a member of mixx for along time this was a planned move on their part.It’s all about selling out for the money.They didn’t expect the backlash and scrambled for an excuse.I talked with Kerry and Chris.Kerry was looking for a way to appease
bloggers,the very people that made that site.Chris cares about one thing and it’s not bloggers.It’s very shady how they randomly apply do follow now as it does not seem to be based on votes.They eliminated the down vote now.The main point is I had alot of stuff on there and not just mine also communities etc the link above is when I wrote about it in June and except for looking at the site real quick I haven’t been back since.
furl<dead, blogcatalog digg all these sites are worthless to me.
When your ready to expand to this lame city of San Antonio let me know it's ripe for the picking
thanks Stumbled
John Sullivan´s last blog ..Google Wave teases with the side wiki
Hmm, well here’s a thought. What if the fact that stories are nofollowed isn’t based on whether or not they front page, or maybe not entirely based on it, but rather they require X amount of trusted users to have voted that story up.
To try to be clearer, maybe a dofollow link requires multiple components:
1) Front Page
2) A certain amount of votes from users with lots of Karma or something
3) ??? I don’t know. Maybe its just 2, or none of these, or there’s even more factors. Just a thought.
Noah´s last blog ..Effective Marketing Requires Simple Communications
Eh the truth is that it doesn’t really matter what process Mixx uses to determine what is no follow or follow. the site is mostly no follow and sends little traffic, therefore I see little value in spending time there.
That’s the main point.
omg! i am totally in love with this new addon thank you! the best for ceo!