It’s easy to be a bad company these days. Just don’t give too much of a hoot about your customers AFTER you’ve got their money for instance. I can think of quite a long list for that.
On the other hand, how about being deliberately deceptive, and actually publishing the fact that you are for the world to see? Now they probably aren’t alone of course, but since I’ve spotted it may as well name and shame:
chainreactioncycles{dot}com (can’t put a link – keep reading….)
They have an alluring “Exchange links with us!” page. There’s a load of gumpf about how echanging links with them will benefit your site. They’ll even pop your link on their homepage for a day or so. Sounds great! But wait….what’s that in the header of your “Partner Links” page. Some appears to have mistakenly added an extra meta tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW” />
Hmmmm – it’s also mistakenly been pasted into the headers of all the other link pages – the ones listing the 800 or so gullible webmasters who fell for this. I just love the way the noindex and nofollow are in all caps to – maybe they are really hoping that’ll make sure Google knows how little these guys think of their llink partners.
On the off chance you don’t know what this meta tag means:
NOINDEX – they are telling the search engines NOT include these pages in their results.
NOFOLLOW – they are telling the search engines they do not vouch for the quality of the sites they are linking to. That’s a bit rich since their “exchange links page” states they check your site to see that it meets their guidlines – I mean, are they doing that or not, and if so, why the nofollow?
They do, it seems, put their newest “partners” on the homepage, but they seem to habve missed out the NOINDEX meta tag. Not to worry, they found a solution to that by cloaking the link with redirects. Fiendishly inventive.
Honestly, this whole “hoard your PageRank” and ongoing battle to trick other webmasters in to thinking they are getting something when they are not is really cheesing me off. The blame has to lie at Google’s feet as they started this whole nofollow nonesense. The initial idea was sound enough – the tag should be used for UGC and I agree with that. I don’t, however agree that it should become a tool for webmasters to manipulate their ranking in the search engines and I’m pretty sure it’s intention was to try and put a stop to that anyway. The most laughable example of course is Wikipedia “nofollowing” the links to their sources. Shame on you Google.
Footnote: chainreactioncycles may well be, in all other ways, a reputable company selling quality kit to lots of satisfied customers. I have no experience with which to comment on that though.
