SearchWarp Removes SEO Benefits of Their Service

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

If you've been reading my blog, articles or books for any length of time, you've probably heard me talk about article marketing. For me, article marketing is a classic example of a win-win-win situation...

• The reader gets a helpful article (ideally).


• The writer gets online exposure and SEO benefits.


• The publishing website gets content that they can build a business model on.

That's why I've always recommended publishing articles through websites like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles, and (up until today) SearchWarp.com. It's a great addition to your real estate search engine optimization program.

But here's a recent development you should be aware of. When you publish an article at SearchWarp.com, there is no longer any SEO value in the text links from their site to yours.

Why?

Because Search Warp has begun to use the "nofollow" tag on their outbound links. If you know anything about this tag, you know that it prevents search engines from passing along any trust to the website on the other end of that link. In other words, it removes any and all SEO value from the text link.

Here's a snippet about the "nofollow" tag from Search Engine Watch:

What Nofollow Means
Below I'll cover what Google says it does, if it
sees a link with the nofollow attributed associated with it. Yahoo and MSN are
likely to react in a similar fashion, though I haven't yet spoken with them to
get exact details since news of their support only just emerged.

If Google sees nofollow as part of a link, it will:

1. NOT follow through to that page.
2. NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
3. NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being
linked to is relevant for.

So sure, your article may still get republished onto other websites. And those websites may keep your link intact. But here's the kicker. If the person republishing your article copies it from SearchWarp and pastes it into a content management system (like a blog), they have brought the "nofollow" tag along with it. So you wouldn't get any SEO value out of the republication.

If you ask me, this is selfish on the part of SearchWarp.com. In fact, I told them this a few months ago when they first started talking about using the "nofollow" tag, and again recently when they actually made the move.

I told them their authors give them a business model, allowing them to make money from Google ads and the like. In the past, SearchWarp reciprocated this by allowing standard hyperlinks on all articles. This gave their authors SEO benefits in exchange for the articles they submitted.

But now, SearchWarp.com still takes as much as they always have ... they just give less back in return.

Just thought you might want to know.

~Brandon