Techmeme Sell Links

Techmeme has very clear advertising with sponsored posts

The links they use are redirects

http://www.techmeme.com/goto/onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/ businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI

If you check the Http Status Codes

SEO Consultants Directory Check Server Headers - Single URI Results
Current Date and Time: 2008-01-31T03:10:07-0700
User IP Address: 213.158.xxx.xx

#1 Server Response: http://www.techmeme.com/goto/onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/ 2008/01/30/
businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:10:06 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Location: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/ businessweek-on-air- applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI
Content-Length: 388
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Redirect Target: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/ businessweek-on-air- applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI

#2 Server Response: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/ businessweek-on-air- applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:09:22 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch7
X-Pingback: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/xmlrpc.php
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

You discover that it is a 301 redirect used for tracking, and in theory could pass "Google Juice" - the link could be counted as a real link by search engines.

However you then need to look at the Techmeme robots.txt file

User-Agent: MSIECrawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /goto/

Traditional SEO thinking is that robots.txt blocks the passing of Google Juice and PageRank

That however isn't how it has been confirmed by Matt Cutts to operate.

As I discussed in my SEO Linking Gotcha's post, Robots.txt does not prevent a page from accumulating PageRank, it purely stops a page from being crawled most of the time, though that is fallible (There was further discussion on Sphinn).

Confused? So Am I

I can remember seeing Techmeme as a PR6, maybe even as high as a PR7. Robert Scoble seems to have removed his blogroll link to them, but they don't honestly need the juice any more. Techmeme honestly has tons of links.

I can't believe as some might suggest that there is less PageRank in the technology sector, as has been suggested about the SEO sector in the past.

Techmeme hasn't really changed its internal linking structure. From an SEO perspective it isn't exactly ideal in my way of thinking, but that again would be highly contested as many people believe you can't benefit from controlling internal linking.

So Why A Penalty?

If those redirects were actually links to a static page, they would still accumulate PageRank, even if blocked with robots.txt, and could still appear in search results based upon whatever data Google derives from the pages linking to it.

Linking again to my SEO linking Gotchas just in case you ignored the first link.

It is possible that for a period of time Techmeme didn't have a robots.txt file, mistakes happen, though when I last checked back in October the robots.txt was exactly the same as it is now.

The page is blocked with robots.txt, so the Googlebot shouldn't crawl the page, unless for some reason it did.

It seems to me, relying on robots.txt for paid links isn't safe

2 safe options

1. Nofollow all links
2. Use meta nofollow on the redirect page

The only people who can confirm that Techmeme has some kind of penalty one way or the other are Google

If Techmeme has been given a penalty, they are not the only ones to have been given a PageRank penalty unfairly.

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