I remember watching a history show about the gold rush. I learned a valuable lesson. A lot of people didn’t get rich during the gold rush. The ones that did, it was usually the people selling the shovels to the diggers. Today, Commove launched. I’m incredibly proud of this game. I think it’s awesome. But as I was trying to promote it, I was reminded of that historic lesson. While checking the HTML code on the Commove iTunes pages, “nofollow” hyperlinks were revealed.
Search Engine Optimization is important to me. I’m a professional web developer and I’ve seen how SEO can add thousands of visitors to a website every month. I was looking at the iTunes listing for Commove and I noticed something wasn’t right.
The “Photics Web Site” link went to http://photics.com/commove and the “Commove (for iPad) Support” link went to http://photics.com. The links were backwards. I went to fix it. I didn’t want the robots from Google, Bing and other search engines to get confused. The word “Commove” should be pointing toward the “Commove” page. That’s good Search Engine Optimization! Yet, I started to wonder if Apple was rigid enough to set the links to nofollow. That tells the search engines to ignore those links.
I was reminded of my historic lesson. Sure, the iPad is a gold rush. But so far, it’s more of a gold rush for Apple than me. To develop for their platform, I needed a Mac, a testing device and a developer’s license. Then, I have to submit my app and wait days while Apple reviews it. After all of that that hard work, I’m quite insulted to see the “nofollow” setting on links to my site.
1 2 3 | <a class="see-all" rel="nofollow" href="http://photics.com/commove" target="_blank">Photics Web Site</a> <a class="see-all" rel="nofollow" href="http://photics.com" target="_blank">Commove (for iPad) Support</a> |
The “nofollow” setting is used as a way to combat spammers. It gives webmasters a way to defend their search engine standing. If your site is known for linking to bad sites, it’s guilt by association. If a spammer starts linking to porn on your website, it might cause SEO problems for you. This is fairly common if you have a comment section. That’s why the “nofollow” link is used. It tells the search engine robots, “Hey… don’t associate me with this website.”
…but what the “nofollow” link tells me is that Apple doesn’t respect developers as much as they should. They don’t want to share web traffic with us, even after reviewing our content and collecting personal information. It seems insulting to me me. I’m not sure why Apple would do this.
It seems that I’m just a man with a shovel to them. 