For any bloggers out there who want to avoid Google tagging things and marking them as you or related to your site, a handy bit of code to know is the rel=”nofollow” attribute of an anchor tag. Links on your blog usually are considered related or relevant to the original page, otherwise why is the link there? If you link to a bunch of stupid things then google will say ok blogx = bunch of stupid things. Lets look at the best example of this. Everyone open a new tab in your browser and type in Nathan Fernsten into your google bar. Now click to search google images. What do you see? As you can see in the screen shot below, Nathan Fernsten has become a hideous cross breed photoshopped thing.
How did this happen!? screams Nathan. Well Nathan, it’s very simple you see your blog isn’t very popular, but you have google indexing it. And when you linked the mccullochs site on your sidebar to that image as a joke, we let you keep it there for a few weeks. And each time we visited your site we clicked on that link, showing us that image, (not on purpose to set you as that image, but b/c we wanted to see if you had changed it yet) since you didn’t change it this is what google saw. (Start talking like a computer) Person wants to find Nathan Fernsten, person found Nathan at this site, person clicked on link that says mccullochs, got picture, ended session at nathan’s site. Hmmm this image is now the most clicked on link on Nathan’s site, this image must be very important, set this image as very relevant to Nathan. (end computer talk)
So thank you Nathan for the greatest trick ever played on yourself. I will enjoy clicking on that image each time I search for you in google images to make sure it still thinks it’s relevant. And remember every one else, if your site is being crawled by google (ours isn’t), use the rel=”nofollow” tag to tell google what’s not important to your site.
<a href=”http://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>example</a>