Google’s Matt Cutts recently said the nofollow SEO technique will no longer be as effective.

This week at SMX Advanced, Google’s high-profile head of Webspam and liaison to search marketers worldwide, Matt Cutts, pulled the rug out from under SEOs and Webmasters everywhere when he suggested that a previously sanctioned search optimization technique heavily relied upon by many site optimizers would not be supported in the same way. In short, he stated that the nofollow attribute that is considered helpful in preventing spam and even sculpting a site’s PageRank would no longer be as effective.

Who does this affect?
Because the active use of nofollow is a more advanced SEO effort, this change won’t affect the majority of search optimizers. However, the popular blogging platform WordPress (used by this blog) uses nofollow on links left by commenters, so every WordPress blogger is potentially affected.

Google has long recommended the use of nofollow when linking to content excluded via various exclusion protocols; Webmasters who have followed Google’s guidelines are now up a creek. And finally, advanced SEOs who use nofollow links to sculpt their PageRank will certainly be scrambling to modify their sites.

More on the nofollow attribute, how it’s used and the impact this news will have on PageRank follows here.

Last week, author Rebecca Lieb managed to distill her new book “The Truth about Search Engine Optimization,” from 51 chapters into a single truth. How can she top that? In the continuation of the interview, she first addresses what truth means in this context. Then she tackles the biggest SEO myth. She closes with answering a few questions submitted via Twitter, but I didn’t limit her response to 140 characters. Read the full article

Videos are more likely than text to get on the first page of Google’s search results, according to Forrester Research’s Nate Elliott. This is a huge story, but there’s an even bigger angle: getting on the first page of Google’s search results is really, really hard.I missed Nate’s initial blog post, but fortunately caught the subsequent NewTeeVee analysis. NewTeeVee reported, “Videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than text pages…” In a single sentence, this sums up the need for the importance of including videos as part of a search engine optimization program. Done — I’m sold.

Read the comments to Nate’s post for a few other perspectives, like Max Kalehoff describing how the viral nature of great videos makes them search engine bait, and Billy Ye noting how video results have a relatively fleeting presence in the top rankings compared to Web sites that maintain their authority more consistently. All of this matters, but if you have any video assets, you must consider how you’re optimizing them. Say Nate’s analysis is off and the real effect is 23x or 10x instead of 53x. Would you treat the study any differently? I wouldn’t. Read the full article

Imagine you go around the world spending months shooting footage for a campaign. Then you spend millions on a media buy that includes blanketing primetime TV and Sunday football games. You create a microsite with high quality video that’s the centerpiece of the entire campaign. And then, for a huge percentage of people who are trying to find the video, you’re invisible – your brand is NOWHERE to be found.

That’s what happened with Burger King’s Whopper Virgins campaign. We’ve covered this in detail on Ad Age’s DigitalNext blog. Here’s an excerpt:

There are three areas of neglect here:

• The domain: WhopperVirgin.com is a parked domain filled with ads for Burger King store listings, Virgin Mobile gifts, Virgin Atlantic flights, Virgin Islands vacations and Virgin Mary checks.
• Search engine optimization: The microsite doesn’t appear on the first three pages of Google results for “whopper virgin” searches.
• Paid search: While reviewing Google’s listings over several days, there hasn’t been a search ad running on “whopper virgin” queries.

Meanwhile, as the ad campaign continues, searches for “whopper virgin” are starting to overtake “whopper virgins” queries:

Image via CrunchBase

Today, 360i was quoted in MediaPost about the potential search engine optimization (SEO) value of Facebook including links to Pages in public profiles. Theoretically that adds a ton of links to Pages. But it’s not so clear-cut.

If you’ve ever done some vanity searching in Google (come on, admit it) and you have profiles on a number of sites, you probably found that your LinkedIn page, Flickr account, and other links come up before Facebook. We were doing a lot of vanity searching in the office yesterday to test this out, and Facebook links were out there, but generally buried.

Some of this was addressed in MediaPost:

…Potential traffic gains for branded Pages from search engine listings could be limited by Facebook’s lack of focus on search engine optimization. “The way links on Facebook are structured right now, they don’t have the type of permanence that search engines are looking for,” said David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy at search engine marketing firm 360i.

He continued: “Facebook does evolve pretty quickly, but so far they’ve been a little behind the curve when it comes to SEO.”

If the SEO benefits show up, marketers will be paying much more attention. We’ve already built some Facebook Pages for marketers, so we’ll be monitoring this religiously. This came up in MediaPost too:

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