Hammer Media Network: Chris Hamilton | The Chookpen | Australian Bookmakers | Australia Betting

Utilising Social Media Sites

Many people know that some social media / social network websites will allow you to publish do-follow links on their accounts and that’s great, but many people get tricked into believing that these links are always worth something. More often than not, they are simply not worth their time. Why? A certain file named ‘robots.txt’. Let me explain.

For this article, we’ll use www.revolutionhealth.com as an example. This website has been doing the rounds lately with people jumping at the opportunity to ‘get a free link from a PR7 domain’. So let’s have a look. I setup my account, and I was able to add a do-follow link onto my profile back to my blog – http://www.revolutionhealth.com/community/people/profile/chrishamilton. Looks good right? Well it would, except for this – http://www.revolutionhealth.com/robots.txt. Contained in this file is -

User-agent: *
Disallow: /community/people/profile/

The bolded line highlights that the Webmaster of www.revolutionstaff.com wants to block search engines from reaching any page on the /community/profiles/people/ URL level and because the public link to my profile is http://www.revolutionhealth.com/community/people/profile/chrishamilton. That means that page will never get crawled or cached by search engines, rendering that particular ‘do-follow’ link useless.

People need to pay more attention to a domains robots.txt file. Just because a link is ‘do-follow’ does not mean its going to have any value to a search engine.

Twitter Updates