It’s interesting to think about how to beat Wikipedia for “SEO” in Google. Or in fact, how to beat any seemingly invincible competitor in the rankings.
A not too creative but probably effective method would be to build a great non-profit resource. A site that provides consistently high quality SEO stuff, including news, opinions and education, but without a single ad, affilate link or self-promotion would become a top favorite to link to within 1-2 years.
Sure, it should be a long term investment with uncertain benefits. You wouldn’t be able to monetize it later, unless you really want to antagonize everybody in the industry. You would, however, be able to build a strong reputation on it even with the handicap of beginning a decade after most SEO big guns.
Another, quite risky method would be to build your castle mostly on nofollowed links.
“Buy” on the cheap
In the current online environment, nofollowed links are looked down on as a poor cousin to clean links. A low quality, low value commodity. Counterfeit money in an economy where PageRank is the de facto currency.
By expressly encouraging people to link to your site with “rel=nofollow”, you’d basically say, Please help me out with something that’s worthless anyway. It should be much easier than asking for something of value.
Plus, you’ll have instant trust because if there is no PageRank flow involved, you apparently make it impossible for yourself to bait and switch.
Why do it, then?
The tables might turn. Just as domain names were cheap after the dot-com crash and a great investment in hindsight, perhaps links with an obscure little attribute in the code might some day re-gain their value.
There could be several reasons for this.
- Shifting search market positions, with one or more nofollow-ignoring search engines taking business away from the current leader.
- Google backtracking on nofollow if and when they finally get back to the search engine business from their current empire building spree, and realize they can actually solve their problems (paid links, PR flow etc.) on their own, without coded hints from intimidated webmasters.
- Google waiving the enforcement of nofollow for inbound links if the resulting omission of a site clearly hurts relevancy.
This last point is based on the assumption that you can successfully go against Google if you build something they can’t afford not to rank.
Online outlaws
In the wider scheme of things, “rel=nofollow” may even be part of an alternative online reality. Imagine a directory that only lists sites that robots.txt-d Google away.
That directory would offer something truly unique. Exclusive stuff you just won’t find in Google. And if the directory itself also joins the “outlaws”, with a clever marketing campaign it could receive a huge amount of nofollowed links as a show of solidarity.
Even so, in times of peace (when Google plays nice), that directory would perhaps be just an interesting footnote. But in times of upheaval, it would be the standard bearer of revolution and with some luck, it could even gain traction enough to change the rules.
