SEO cock-up - I forgot about nofollow

I just posted tonight about tracking spam behaviour to find link sources - then realised I’d overlooked nofollow.

In fact, I’ve been overlooking nofollow for some time now, and I’m slapping my head in frustration.

One of my SEO projects in development was a small network of blogs, with human writers assigned to write about popular posts in the blosophere - ostensibly for the trackbacks, to create a good link profile.

I’ve had “nofollow” set up in my Firefox stylesheet so I can spot these quickly - but completely overlooked that Wordpress uses “external nofollow” in the code.

So all this time, this particular project has ended up accruing not a load of interesting links, but instead, a load of nofollowed trackback links.

I’d earlier checked the traffic of one of the blogs, and was surprised how low it was - now I know why.

Anyway, I need a change of strategy now.

Instead of a small number of writers covering a large number of blogs, focus on multiple writers per blog to ensure updated frequently, and therefore attract - and retain - real human user traffic.

Additionally, have these writers source popular blogs with real traffic, so even if the nofollow’s render the trackbacks useless for SEO, they can serve as a line for drawing in human traffic.

In the meantime, I’m slapping my forehead at this stupid mistake, but I guess there’s no point crying over spoilt milk - I know what I need to do to address the issue by changing tact, so that’s what I’ll do.

Adaption is everything online…