Testimonial links

If you’ve looked at almost anything on our website, TollFreeNumbers.com you’ve probably already seen some of our thousand plus customer testimonials. We really appreciate them more than we probably would in a big company, because they are from our work, not someone else in the company. Anyway, because of recent announcement and policy changes at Google we were recently told that we really had to change the links in our testimonials.

Our goal in everything we do is to maximize the benefit to the customer and that was part of our thinking with the testimonials too. But Google has made several announcements regarding paid links and link farms etc. Some experts also told us that although we’ve had the best intentions, these testimonials will appear to the Google bots like a link farm or at least will cause some decrease in our credibility if we’re linking to customer websites that aren’t related to ours at all and/or are of a low quality or in a bad neighborhood. Linking to anyone who pays you for a link without any disclosure is frowned on by the Search Engine gods and possibly even the FCC in some circumstances.

The solution was to add NO FOLLOW tags to the links. The link is still visible and still provides many of the benefits, for many of the search engines. See Joe Whyte’s article about No Follow tags and their effect on search engines: http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/blog/2007/05/do-nofollow-tags-really-pass-link-love.html

Heres what Joe Whyte at Search Marketing Standard says in summarizing nofollow tags:

  1. They are good for getting a site crawled
  2. They are good for helping a overall inbound links
  3. They assist in search saturation
  4. They can help pass relevancy
  5. They are stupid and I hate them
  6. They give people a sense of security which really is not there
  7. Not many people use these correctly
  8. I think if it would be up to us to help determine link value, someone should start a conference about it
  9. I don’t think you can rank for competitive terms with just nofollow links
  10. I think search engines pay attention to nofollows, to what degree is unsure

We never promoted the testimonial links as anything other than what they are and are supposed to be. We don’t want anyone to write a testimonial just because of the link. We don’t write them or tell them what to say at all. We only want people to write what they honestly feel and would say to someone else about us. It’s still beneficial to our customer’s sites, but the No Follow tags protect us from looking like some type of link farm and keeps the system honest and safer for us to do.

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