I started this as a comment to an article at viperchill.com about WordPress SEO (something I know a lot about), but I tend to get very wordy so turned it into my own article. Also you’ll note the weird title for this article “Viperchill.com, SEO Nofollow PR Sculpting, RSS Feeds and Social Networking!” it kind of went all over the place 
Viperchill.com Viral Marketing Website
One of my regular readers (Mark) made a comment on the article Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site? and referred to viperchill.com (which I’d not seen before). The sites by a young man (early twenties I think) that’s getting a lot of traffic, but unlike my network of sites (90%+ of my traffic is from Google and other major search engines) his traffic seems to be mostly from social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter) and lots of RSS feed subscribers and his search engine traffic is relatively low. See his recent months stats breakdown for one of his domains viperchill.com:
1. Direct: 13,350
2. StumbleUpon: 12,038
3. Google (organic): 4,978
4. Twitter.com: 2,407
5. Google.com: 1,694
6. SmartPassiveIncome.com: 1,310
7. Facebook.com: 567
8. Rentier-blog.pl: 478
9. Thirdtribemarketing.com: 390
10. Farbeyondthestars.com: 306
It’s not a lot of traffic overall for a month at about 1,500 visitors a day (though not bad for a 8 month old site in that niche), but traffic from Google (less than 200 visitors a day) is a very small fraction of his traffic compared to direct and Stumbleupon (close to 900 visitors a day)!
If I had those sorts of figures from social networking sites relative to my search engine traffic on all my sites I’d be looking at 200,000+ visitors a day! Unrealistic since it’s probably a case viperchill.com isn’t doing great in Google like some of my sites are, so it wouldn’t be such a dramatic increase. A more realistic example is this site (http://www.45-year-old-millionaire.co.uk/) which only gets ~3,000 visitors a month, pretty much all from Google and it’s not an important site to me (I’ve not put any real effort into it, somewhere to track my affiliate earnings mostly, not many articles). So I would be very happy if this site generated so much non-search engine traffic relatively speaking (especially if it wasn’t too much work ).
I was looking at his site for ideas, trying to figure out which WordPress plugins he uses etc… for getting feed subscribers etc… (I don’t even know how many subscribers I have on any of my sites!) when I took a look at the WordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need article and had to comment on the nofollow advice which is out of date and wrong.
Why Nofollow PR Sculpting is Bad for Search Engine Optimization
Nofollowing sculpting, as it is commonly referred, is simply about keeping and diverting link juice (link weight) to the pages where you want it to go. For example, on every page on my site there is a link to the contact form. Does it really need to be a powerful page?
Just linking to the page once is enough to have it indexed in Google, and that’s all that matters for a number of my pages. Similarly, I nofollow links to my about page, my category links and my RSS feed. This means that the ‘weight’ from backlinks I’m getting to my own post won’t be spread to those pages.
That was true a couple of years ago, but Google has changed significantly how it treats a nofollow link and so it’s no longer a good idea to use nofollow, the above is no longer true.
Where nofollow used to protect link benefit when nofollow was first introduced so we could sculpt PageRank etc… today Google DELETES the link benefit it used to protect!!! Bloody stupid way for Google to bring in a perfectly useful tool (nofollow) and then change it to damage a sites SEO, think about all the WordPress blogs that are filled with nofollowed commenter’s links!
What this means is every nofollow link is counted as a normal text link in link benefit usage terms (so uses PR/link benefit), but doesn’t benefit the page that’s linked to. PR sculpting no longer works if you use nofollow, it damages a sites SEO efforts quite badly by wasting link juice that could be used elsewhere on or off the site!!!
With regards PR sculpting with nofollow it’s now better to send the link benefit to your less important pages (like contact pages) as at least you can recover some of the link benefit by linking from those unimportant pages to the rest of the site. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than throwing link benefit away. With regards affiliate links I’m afraid we have to go back to hiding links (with regards link benefit transfer) from Google with tricks like javascripting affiliate links etc…
I was looking through the code of viperchill.com to try to figure out which WordPress plugins he uses (in particular that subscribe to RSS feed email form) and saw he’s got a LOT of nofollow links!
I use WordPress on over 50 domains and there are ways to remove all the nofollow links created by default WordPress through various template customisations like I use on the Talian SEO/AdSense WordPress Theme and WordPress plugins that prevent commenter’s links from turning into a text link (so plain text rather than a click-able link). Not very user friendly having links you have to copy and paste from comments, but it’s better than wasting so much link benefit on nofollow links that pass no benefit to a commenter (unless you dofollow your commenter’s links of course).
RSS Feeds and Social Networking
I’ve been an SEO purist (only concentrate on search engine traffic) for a very long time and get 95%+ of my traffic from Google and other major search engines and have to admit haven’t embraced what the author of viperchill.com does to generate traffic (social networking, Facebook, Twitter etc…), for example I have over 5,000 Twitter followers (2,000+ more than he does), Tweet all my important articles, but it’s rare to get traffic from Twitter etc… (I could delete my Twitter and I’d notice no traffic loss!).
We just had a general election in the UK and my General Election 2010 site received over 100,000 search engine visitors on election day (crashed my dedicated server!), but never really received a lot of non-search engine traffic despite all those visitors. Right now traffic has died to around 1,500 visitors a day for June, which is a big drop from the average daily traffic for April and May of around 25,000 visitors a day. The site has almost 7,000 comments, but does not have a current repeat visitor attraction and know some of that is due to me not embracing other forms of attracting and more importantly keeping visitors.
Basically every day my sites receives tens of thousands of brand new visitors from search engines and like sand trickling through my fingers I don’t grab many of them long term.
I’m going to at least use a Feedburner RSS feed on this site and make subscribing easy just as soon as I find out how
I feel like such a newbie to making money online when I write articles like this one and yet will probably make over $60,000 from affiliate type revenue this year on top of my main income.
David Law
Website - SEO Consultant
7 responses to Viperchill.com, SEO Nofollow PR Sculpting, RSS Feeds and Social Networking!
SEO guys and SEM guys
I check subscribe stats under – google “webmaster tools” – “your site on the web” – “Subscriber stats” , when I check this I see only and hand full.
So I guess my conclusion is there are SEO guys and SEM guys. If I could somehow take the best parts of SEM without changing too much, this could only help.
I want to continue focusing on the interesting content approach but with a little SEM, then maybe it would not hurt. Time users spend on my site is pretty long so I will try:
1) Put more opportunities for people to subscribe and make the invitation really tempting or easy to notice with interesting RSS icons etc.
2) Maybe in paint.net create a simple logo (gives sites more a professional I am here to stay look).
3) Start guest blogging
People tell me ‘fans’ or subscribers will start to promote the site, they like. (This is true, my cousin was the latest friend of mine to buy one if your Talian themes.)
So I think a loyal fan base is important.
However, it can not replace SEO or content. This should always be first. Content and organic search has been very kind to me.
Your election site rocked. It was higher than the BBC for many keywords. If there is no UK election in 2010 in the fall
Make it a general UK politics site somehow.
Viperchill.com, SEO Nofollow PR Sculpting, RSS Feeds and Social Networking!
Interesting his recent post says that you should find a niche around an event (like you did with UK 2010 general elections). He says these event based niches perform very well and are one way to drive a lot of traffic very fast. In fact, some people unethically release results and videos before the event begins.
Hai,, i am from Indonesia. I like your blog because i want have income from online as you, Thanks
David,
You continue to amaze me that you are making so little on affiliate and adsense when you have so much seo knowledge.
Hire an employee to build your sites out. With your direction a single employee should be able to build enough websites in the next year for you to retire.
Rick
Rick
Dave, but you have rss feed on this site despite you state in the article you don’t. What is the problem with that?
Promoting WordPress Sites Through RSS Feeds
You’ve misunderstood, I said I don’t promote my sites through RSS feeds (I’ve put no effort into it and received very little interest from it).
There’s a lot of webmasters (like the author of Viperchill.com) who clearly generate a crap load of RSS followers and I was trying to explain despite receiving thousands of new visitors a day I don’t get many RSS feed followers. It’s an untapped resource.
The RSS feed link to Feedburner (top right menu) is a test to see if having a big RSS feed button will generate more interest. It hasn’t so far
last time I checked it was around 5 subscribers (some low number). I’ve put a similar setup on a jokes site with days it will see over 15,000 unique visitors a day and again it’s single figure subscriber numbers! Clearly I’m doing something wrong.
David
Viperchill.com, SEO Nofollow PR Sculpting, RSS Feeds and Social Networking!
RSS Feed Subscribers vs Organic Search Engine Traffic
Dave, I have the same issue you have. I have been trying to promote subscribers. I recently added subscribe by mail. With the exception of a real niche site most people find my sites with organic searches, rather than subscribing.
I think to get people do subscribe it is an art in itself. My friend has 100s and a loyal fan base, but he uses give aways and contests etc. He puts a lot of effort into it. I do not have the time or focus for that.
The advantage is you are independent of search engines, and loyal fans often market you and generate a lot of content for you in comments.
How you achieve this is another story, maybe it is connected to the type of site or just marketing.
On the other hand nothing beats organic traffic from search engines to make your site grow fast.
Viperchill.com, SEO Nofollow PR Sculpting, RSS Feeds and Social Networking!
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