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Cristian Mezei Interview
I have had a few people ask “how can I get on your blogroll”, if you have noticed I do not currently have one, why? My plan is to do micro interviews with people who can offer something new to the SEO conversation. Cristian Mezei asked me this via email and I said, “Sitewide links are for weaklings, how about answering a few questions”? Here is micro-interview with Chris.
Cristian, Cristian, Cristian, you have been a bad boy trying to do link building with seobuzzbox.com, I bet you didn’t know that “the box” has gone all natural. I once begged Aaron Wall for a link and he said that my junk wasn’t that “uber” interesting but he did later link to a few things of mine in here.
Hi Aaron. :)
Well, I don’t miss any opportunity to get some coverage from trustful websites. Yours is one of those. I gave it a shot, so bare with me :)
Are you aware of the benefits of not interlinking with spam sites?
Sure I am .. I myself have some websites with this issue. Some links are already bought, so I have to wait for them to finish their period (although I refunded *some* other advertisers, and removed their links. just because I didn’t wanted to link to them anymore).
One of my biggest problems is the low indexed pages, because of outbound links to spam websites.
Site-wide text links (to or from other websites, spam or not) are also a big concern. I would not recommend them at all. If you have the opportunity to get one, just pass (or ask a link/give a link on the index page and 3-4 other pages only).
I noticed you on Threadwatch and you and I were probably the only ones who defended the use of the “nofollow” tag. What do you think of it and give us some examples of how we can use it to optimize our websites, directories or blogs.
I am glad you brought this up. Most of the other people are against it, indeed Aaron. I think it’s great. Not only that allows us to choose which websites get pagerank and weight from our websites, but it can also help the internal/external pagerank distribution (see the below note).
What I am going to say further, is probably something that other people will disagree with. It’s just my own personal opinion.
I use the nofollow attribute on my internal pages too, altough the nofollow tag was for outbound links. Currently all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) as well as the major CMS builders/providers (Wordpress, Drupal, Typepad, etc) recognize it and apply it.
My vision on the use of the nofollow attribute on internal pages is : direct the pagerank and weight to your most important pages. For a news website, to news articles, for a software company, to product pages, for a blog, to individual posts, for a directory to category pages and individual website detail pages and so on. The rest of the pages, that you really don’t care if they rank or not, could have the nofollow tag (like the privacy policy, report this website, xml feed, etc).
Matt Cutts wrote a quick comment on nofollow too. In his opinion, of you mark a link with a nofollow attribute, than it’s ok to sell it. If you don’t, it’s not ok, and you can suffer a penalisation (you *can* have your PR transferring ability canceled, although your rankings will not be penalized).
I also use nofollow on links to search engine results pages, and other pages that are not indexed in the SE’s anyway. It’s stupid to transfer some of your pagerank to a page that’s never gonna’ be indexed in a search engine right ? Some people disagree with me on this issue, at Threadwatch.
Some other major players are concerned that this nofollow attribute can have an unwanted effect on the natural linking effect that we, white hats, want on the web, and that people will start to refrain themselves from linking naturally to other websites, that otherwise they would’ve linked without any problem or second thought. Well I can say that that’s bullshit. How many Internet users are actually web-savvy 5%? How many of the web users actually know how to place a link with an anchor (letting the other attributes aside)? Most of them just copy paste the URL in a page.
I think that we, web professionals, tend to think that all people are like us. Well it’s not like that. Most people just “use” the Internet.
And we, “web professionals” know how to use the nofollow attribute, and when. So this wraps it up, as far as my thoughts on the nofollow attribute go. :)
PS: Interesting info about the no nofollow policy. I do not agree with some of the things explained there, but hey… People have to know about it.
You got a good looking directory going there, tell us a little about it.
Well, yeah. Webxperience! is my pet project. I simply love it. It now has more than 2 years of age, and several thousand euros invested. I tried to build up a great team and to make it a quality directory like Skaffe, Joeant, Dmoz etc.
Unfortunately, it now receives over 400 submissions per day, and we just can’t keep up with it, free. So we are turning it into a paid one, in a matter of days, (this was NOT my idea at all, but we simply don’t have enough time to maintain it for free), with hopes that this will reduce on the spam listings we get.
We rejected more than 65-70.000 links up until now, and only approved about 7000. This says a lot. It still has some spam in it, but good people are working each day on it, to delete what’s wrong, edit that’s spam etc. We also got a lot of feedback from visitors so thanks for that guys.
We will try to charge as little as possible, for a standard listing ($5-$10), so that everyone can afford to put their website there. We are after quality websites, and not to make millions of dollars from it. Even a charge of $1 will drastically remove move of the spam. You get my point.
Thanks for stopping in for a chat.
Thank you for the interview too Aaron. Have a great week and don’t forget that link on the non-existent blogroll ;)
Note: Cristian referred to me as “Bill” throughout this interview but I corrected it and him, he must be spending too much time on Threadwatch. (doh!)
Similar Post:
June 22nd, 2006 at 7:48 am
Yeah I did. Actually while I was writing some of the answers to your questions, I was also reading some posts in Bill’s blog (seobythesea).
Anyway I appreciate those small things that you do, that make the reading a lot more funny :)
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:01 am
Thanks dude!
June 23rd, 2006 at 4:46 am
Alright, finally an SEO interview with someone I’ve heard of :)
Keep up the good work. This interview was better than being caught in rush-hour traffic in Bucharest, if you catch my drift :)
June 23rd, 2006 at 4:54 am
Thanks man .. Today I lost my mobile anyway .. I’m pissed :)
400 contacts and for some of them, I can’t get the number back.
June 23rd, 2006 at 5:41 am
Darren, please stick with one URL in your signature, dont want this place to turn into a bad neighborhood, but yes, I have done the same on others blogs but try to refrain. ;)
June 23rd, 2006 at 5:43 am
Yes, it was a cookie issue, I believe. Linking to any of my sites would actually place you in a very good neighborhood.
June 25th, 2006 at 8:03 am
Hey Christian, questions/pair of suggestions re: your directory.
As a mod over at HEDir, we’re running into the same spam you are. It’s a complete pain in the ass.
So I made a pair of suggestions that I’m going to make to you:
1) Many of our site suggestions and comments are automated submissions. Chances are, the same thing’s going on with you. A CAPTCHA tool may be in order.
(Side note to Aaron: same thing might be in order to prevent carcasher spam.)
2) Force registration before submission if at all possible.
In other words, make people work for it and you’ll eliminate the spam without having to make it a paid directory (which is one of those concepts that IMHO defeats the purpose of natural linking).
Anyway, just some thoughts, dude. Hope they help. (If you like them, add my site. I can’t figure out where it’s supposed to go. Doesn’t seem to be a category for it. :) )
Adam
June 25th, 2006 at 8:22 am
hey there,
1. In 2-3-4 days, an upgrade on the directory back-end will be done. Captcha will be included.
2. We already implemented a blacklist (based on certain occurances of words in title/description/url) as well as a ban list (frequent spammers are banned, by IP, e-mail, website) within the directory.
June 25th, 2006 at 9:05 am
Well fine then. Just rain all over my little idea parade, why dontcha? :)
Seriously, good on ya. I do have one question though, having looked through your site a little further.
You’ve got categories for both white and black pride. There’s nothing in them yet from what I could see, but do you really want to be doing something like that? (Or is that part of the default skin of your dir)?
I found them here by accident:
http://www.webxperience.org/directory/Society_and_Culture/Cultures_and_Groups/
Doesn’t really make much difference to me personally, but it might be one of those things that makes your directory look bad.
June 25th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Out of all the other 40 things that we need to improve on Webxperience!, this will be one of them.
Thanks.
June 25th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
No probs. I figured that was one that got overlooked.
July 11th, 2006 at 12:21 am
Cristian - It’s a pity that your directory doesn’t take free submissions for non-commercial sites.
July 11th, 2006 at 4:36 am
We’ve been 100% free from almost 2 years.
If you have a quality, original content, non-commercial website, submit it using the standard URL, and skip the payment step..
Than e-mail the editors at the e-mail in the content page, and they’ll approve it.
Is this ok for you ? :)
PS: mention anywhere in the e-mail, SeoBuzzBox.
July 11th, 2006 at 5:05 am
Dear Cristian,
Many thanks, I’ve gone ahead and submitted a small informational (and non-commercial) site of mine.
It’s very kind you did this for me, but it would still be nice if you could offer non-commercial listings for others in a less roundabout fashion. Perhaps when they submit, ask them to click on ‘commercial’ or ‘non-commercial’ links, or something like that?
Again, thanks again for kindly offering to do this as a one-off.
Ian
ps: Perhaps you could handle non-commercial sites with volunteer editors? Although, of course, I know how this can turn out (DMOZ? eugh! :] )
July 12th, 2006 at 11:21 pm
Approved.
July 13th, 2006 at 3:32 am
How about you let the first entry for a category be free? Then you can advertise this round the SEO forums, and if people go to submit some sites for free, they may also pay for some sites too. It’s a one-off burst of submissions to deal with, and a possible longer-term gain.
Just an idea :)
(oh, and you’d probably want to have a limit on number of sites per submitter)
Thanks again,
Ian