For those of you not familiar with SearchWarp they are an article submission site. You write something, they post it. In the process they place ads along with the articles to make money. The benefit for the person posting is SW articles tend to rank pretty well in the search engines giving them some exposure and they also link back to their sites for link-love.

SearchWarp just started a new policy of adding “nofollow” to the outbound links on their site. This prevents the article authors from getting the most benefits of their submissions because it blocks the search engines from following those links.

In a response to toddieg, SearchWarp explained:

Earlier this year we were targeted by a number of large off-shore SEO companies which started submitting a large number of articles to us. At first we were hadn’t noticed, but eventually the high-quantity and low-quality of articles forced us to start rejecting and removing articles.

Eventually this escalated into the SEO firms vowing revenge, and apparently at least one of them was able to switch the links on their existing articles to link to some pretty bad places, which eventually caused all articles to tank in the search results in the major search engines. Despite making some pretty good guesses, we have been unable to know for sure which articles and which links have resulted in the articles at SearchWarp being deranked. The only solution offered to us by Google was the use of the nofollow attribute. The bottom line is that if we continue to allow unrestrained linking, very few people will be reading the articles on SearchWarp anyway.

Maybe Google doesn’t care about SearchWarp’s authors. Maybe they gave a solution from an engineer’s point of view and not a marketing one. Maybe looking for a tool like bad-neighborhood.com would have been better.

There are really three issues that I have with this policy.

The first is SW tried to slide it in quietly. The only notice I saw was on their new blog that states “We’ve toyed with the idea of using the rel=nofollow tag in all links that appear in articles, but so far we have only used this method in a very limited manner.” There’s a huge difference between “toyed with” and “implemented” and their definition of “limited” is not the same as mine. If you have to be sneaky it is bad policy.

I checked SearchWarp with this CSS hack for FireFox to verify which links were affected. It looks like all external links are now nofollowed from the author bio to the social bookmarking links in the footer of each article.

The second issue is those links were part of the agreement when the “old” articles were added. By removing those links now SearchWarp is effectively altering the agreement without consent. Yes, I am sure the TOS says they can do what you want. Yes, I’m sure you they are legally within their bounds. But I am sure they screwed over their contributors and that won’t play out well. And it will make it harder to get more quality contributions from here out.

The third problem is this is a blatant link-juice grab. When you look at the Author Benefits page SEO is clearly part of the SearchWarp method of operation. They know what they are doing here and the explanation they gave to toddieg doesn’t hold up when they also state “All articles are manually reviewed to ensure that they meet our quality guidelines.”

The end result is spam is a problem for any site that encourages user-contributions and while “nofollow” may be the easiest solution it is definitely not the best. It is just a convenient smoke-screen. By following the policies they set forth themselves SW would combat a lot of the spam problems they are having. By funneling link-juice internally they boost their own site at the expense of the contributors (the internal links become more powerful because the external links are excluded in the eyes of the search engines). SearchWarp is trying to have its cake and eat it too.For the record, I do not have any articles posted at SearchWarp. Now it seems I won’t bother getting around to it.

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