massage and bodywork professionals
a community of practitioners
Massage and Bodywork Professionals- No Follow = No Benefit
Here is the simplest truth I can come up with, when it comes to ranking in google/bing, independent massage therapists need all the help they can get. They are up against some major players in their area's that have thousands to spend on SEO, paid links, and paid content producers. What they should have is a massage organization that supports them, but this community does not.
Massage and Bodywork Professionals uses only no-follow links, so if you think you are getting any help to your website by being a good participant, think again.
Why does this matter to you?
Simple, every time you create content on this site you are helping it. You are contributing. It will naturally rank better in search engines and be more useful to users increasing traffic. Thus, ABMP is able to advertise on every page, increasing their bottom line. However, ABMP is greedy. Even though you are giving them so much by participating, they aren't willing to give anything back to you. The link in your profile to your website should naturally convey authority to your website, if you are an active member of the community.
What can you do?
I would suggest that you reply to this thread asking ABMP to recognize the contributions you are making by allowing links in your Page to be follow links.
Until that occurs I highly suggest you send your time on other communities that will allow you to build authority and reward you for your work. I will put together a list if you all would like. If this doesn't change, I may even consider founding one, but I would prefer ABMP recognize the contribution we all are making.
-Adam Fluke
P.S. If I seem upset, I apologize for my tone. I only just now discovered this when I was doing some routine backlink checks and noticed the none of them were from massageprofessionals.com. Then I insepected the links in my profile and confirmed they were all no follow.
Views: 362
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by martin rørdam on
-
"Massage and Bodywork Professionals uses only no-follow links, so if you think you are getting any help to your website by being a good participant, think again."
Odd!! So far I have 37 links from Massage and Bodywork Professionals according to my Google webmaster tools so..... ??!!
But I write it in my signature every time ;-)
martin aka
ps. this was today's link :-)
-
Permalink Reply by Adam Fluke on
-
This is the html for your link.
a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.masseuren.dk/en" target="_blank">www.masseuren.dk/en
That rel="nofollow" is the important part. I grabbed an explanation from Google that I thought might help.How does Google handle nofollowed links?
In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using
nofollowcauses us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without usingnofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap.So yes, google knows the links exists, but they aren't passing any umph, pagerank, back to your site. That is one of the reasons that nofollow links are inappropriate in this case. The users are trusted users, who do provide good, important, quality content. nofollow is meant to be used for comments and other such openly posted links to prevent spam. Here they are using it to manipulate search engine rankings.
-
-
Yep you'r right.
Our time could be used better elsewhere!
thanks, didn't check the page code!
martin
I think every serious member thinking about their business would skip this forum
-
-
Thanks, I am glad at least one person saw this and was able to adjust their strategy.
martin rørdam said:Yep you'r right.
Our time could be used better elsewhere!
thanks, didn't check the page code!
martin
I think every serious member thinking about their business would skip this forum
-
Permalink Reply by Gordon J. Wallis on
-
I don't come in here for anything except to talk about my work and how I feel about it.. and that's about it.
Adam Fluke said:Thanks, I am glad at least one person saw this and was able to adjust their strategy.
martin rørdam said:Yep you'r right.
Our time could be used better elsewhere!
thanks, didn't check the page code!
martin
I think every serious member thinking about their business would skip this forum
-
-
And that is completely fair. But, I feel most massage therapists will naturally only want to spend so much time/energy working on their online presence. Certainly, and I was one of these people, I want to interact with other MT's, but I also recognize that when I do I am making a significant contribution to the owner of the site. I don't know if you believe in karma, or even just the principle of fair exchanges, but it is how I run my massage business and most other things in my life. In this instance, I feel as though the balance is uneven, and unnecessarily so. It would do ABMP no harm to make profile links dofollow, but it would recognize the contributions we are making.
Gordon J. Wallis said:I don't come in here for anything except to talk about my work and how I feel about it.. and that's about it.
Adam Fluke said:Thanks, I am glad at least one person saw this and was able to adjust their strategy.
martin rørdam said:Yep you'r right.
Our time could be used better elsewhere!
thanks, didn't check the page code!
martin
I think every serious member thinking about their business would skip this forum
-
Permalink Reply by Abram Herman on
-
Hi Adam,
I'll address your points, but would first like to say that ABMP is an entirely member-focused organization, and we would have been happy to take your call and discuss the reasoning behind this policy. Our number is 800-458-2267, my extension is 635, and Lara Braccantie's extension is 646 (she's the creator of this site)--feel free to call us at any time.
The fact that the links are no-follow is obviously not intended to prevent our members from being successful. Our organization's success in fact depends on the success of our members and, as you mentioned, there's absolutely no benefit provided to ABMP by making links on this site no-follow links. The links have been labeled as no-follow for a couple of reasons, the primary being that we've had several requests by the membership of this forum to try and limit the public visibility of forum discussions.
Massageprofessionals.com is not the place to market your massage practice (or other business, in your case), and we do not allow spamming of the forum by marketers (see the community guidelines for more info). This is part of the reason that the links are no-follow.
The larger reason that I mentioned, stemming from multiple requests made to us by the participants in this forum, is that we want this to be a safe, practitioner-focused space to discuss the massage and bodywork profession. It's not a site for consumer education (we provide several other resources, including massagetherapy.com and Body Sense magazine, for that purpose), and many of the participants don't want their interactions on massageprofessionals.com to be so publicly visible to current and potential clients--this is the primary reason that we've decided to make the links on this site no-follow links.I hope that clears up your concerns. Again, if you ever have any questions, please don't hesitate to pick up the phone and give us a call. And thanks for participating in the Massage Professionals forums!
Best,Abram Herman
Site Moderator at massageprofessionals.com
Social Media Coordinator at ABMP
abram@abmp.com
800-458-2267x635
© 2024 Created by ABMP.
Powered by
