Don’t let your web design firm trash your Google rankings

Many of you are getting ripped off by your web design (or hosting) companies, and you don’t even know it.  A while back on my SEO blog I talked about the benefits of doing some minor PageRank sculpting to your site.  Another simple piece you could add to that is the tiny bit of text in the footer of your site that says “Powered by xxxxx” or “Created by xxxxx” or something to that effect.  That link is probably on every page of your site and is helping you leak PageRank like a sieve.

The solution is very simple. Edit the code to include the “nofollow” attribute.  This will leave the link there for people to see and click, but Google will stop following it and it’ll help you focus your link juice on your other pages.  For example, the link probably looks something like this:

<a href=”http://www.xxxxxdesign.com/”>Designed by xxxxx</a>

Simply add rel=nofollow in there, like this:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.xxxxxdesign.com/”>Designed by xxxxx</a>

That’s it!

Frankly, I get more upset about this the more I think about it.  Most design/development/hosting companies promise to give you great Search Engine Optimization and help you rank better, then steal a good chunk of your link juice for their own gain.  It’s awful!  I have never done that to a client and I never will.

If you’re a company that does this kind of work for churches and you already nofollow your links on their sites, please let me know in the comments below and I’ll give you some praise.

What if you want to take it further and sculpt your PageRank a bit more? First, we need to explain what sculpting is — it’s simply the act of nofollowing certain links on your site to help focus the link juice on pages that are more important.  For example, the “privacy statement” on this blog is nofollowed.  I don’t care if it ranks well, and I’d rather get more link juice flowing to the posts on the blog.

On the right is a picture of our church website with the images turned off and the “NoDoFollow” FireFox plug-in turned on (click to view it full-size), to better visualize the link structure of the site.  The blue links are normal (“followed”) links, and the red links are nofollowed.  I’ll explain my reasoning for some of the nofollows:

• “Event Registration” on the right — This points to our third-party Event Registration service.  I want the individual events to rank well, but not the generic registration area.
• “Prayer Requests” on the left — This is just a form for people to fill out.  Why would I want it to rank well?
• The recent blog entries in the middle — We already link to the main blog twice on the home page, so we didn’t want to dilute the PageRank that much more.
• In the center column, you’ll see text duplicated side-by-side (“Preschool Fall Festival”, etc).  These are upcoming events.  The text the on the left is actually an image (view our normal site to see them).  No sense linking each event twice, so we’ll link the text-based version to pass better anchor text to the event page.