Wikio got in touch to tell me that, apparently, I'm the 3rd top blog in their online marketing category. Full results are out on Friday. Make of this what you will. For some reason they supplied me with a table with all the links nofollowed apart from the keyword links to their deep pages. I may have swapped some of that around.

If you add "nofollow" to a link (in the HTML code), it tells search engines to ignore the link - so the site you link to gets no benefit from the link. Last December, the BBC replied to a blog post of mine promising to link to bloggers without using dofollow as part of its new Buzz tool. They've now apparently kept that promise.

There's a fascinating Q&A with the Google search quality team over at Digital Inspiration. Here's some analysis of what they had to say, which includes:

If you don't nofollow affiliate links, your search engine rankings will suffer.
Links in copy ARE worth more than other ones.
Rel=canonical is suggested for cross-domain redirects - 301 isn't mentioned.
Google doesn't seem to like guest blogging.
Linking out both benefits you and doesn't benefit you at the same time.

I might be going bonkers. But I have a Firefox stylesheet that reveals which links are nofollow. And 'm fairly sure that, last time I looked, @ mentions of people's names weren't nofollowed - but now are, as this screenshot demonstrates.

Shownar is a BBC site that tracks the online buzz around the broadcaster's shows. Despite being paid for out of the licence fee, it's pulling the wool over bloggers' eyes by making out that, if you link to it, it will link back - but it's nofollowing the links.
The BBC should either make them normal links - or be much more transparent about its "you link to us and we'll link to you" statement.

Want to get your Twitter page doing better in Google for a search on your name? Here's a way to get a link off the BBC to your Twitter URL.

The furore over Jan Moir has thrown up several interesting SEO issues. Here's a basic one - how should you link to something you detest?

The problem with linking
Put simply, Google counts a link to a ...

The Mirror has removed some of the links to MoneyExtra that I recently warned looked like paid-for links added for SEO reasons (which would put them in breach of Google's guidelines).

Of the 11 pages I pointed out: 5 contained links to the MoneyExtra credit card page - 4 have had the MoneyExtra links removed ...

Trinity Mirror has stopped selling paid links without the nofollow tag. Christian Science Monitor has started.

Is Trinity Mirror selling keyword-rich links on its ic Network without using the nofollow tag? Don't tell Google ...

A list of authority sites that don't link fairly.