By For the past 15 years the internets largest websites have ganged up and attacked small websites using one tool, the nofollow rel attribute. Now, a growing tech-focused blog platform wants to right that wrong.
Navigation: How to Get a Company Page on Hacker Noon
Nofollow, which effectively stops the sending of any SEO value through a hypertext link, was first created by Google in 2005 after WordPress founder Matthew Mullenweg complained that blogs using WordPress were being spammed by SEOs in order to gain link value. When applied in HTML code to a link the nofollow attribute effectively tells a search engine or any other system using links as measurements that one website does not condone or recommend the page/document that it links to. In Google’s system this means PageRank value and other signals may not be sent through the link, giving the destination page no value or credit.
While Google employees have explained in the past that using a Nofollow attribute doesn’t necessarily help a website retain value, it does remove the ability for smaller sites to grow their value by contributing to the larger sites, making these efforts largely useless for link building or other SEO tactics. Massive websites focused more on social engagements like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Medium and others then use the Nofollow attribute to avoid sending value to smaller websites on the off chance that those smaller websites are only trying to spam them for SEO value or could grow into potential competitors.
Nofollow never really accomplished its original goal of stopping comment spam as anyone who owns a WordPress based website can attest to, automated comment spam is as big of an issue in 2020 as it was in 2005. In September of 2019, 14 years into their failure, Google announced they would start recognizing two new html link attributes, “UGC” and “Sponsored”, though they are likely still treated the same as the original Nofollow, it stands to reason Google and other engines could use this expanded data. Then in early 2020 Google decided to start treating all three of these variations as only a “hint”, meaning if they wanted to they could pass PageRank or other SEO value through the links. Though, this is unlikely to be of much use in many cases.
Since Nofollow was introduced 15 years ago many SEOs, webmasters, and small business owners have decried its usage by platforms that find a way to grow large and become valuable. Some journalists and publishers (like CBS) often use nofollow even though links are editorially placed, stripping a small business website of potentially valuable credit in Google’s algorithm. While these large platforms have often found ingenious ways of gaining user generated content and engagements that mostly benefit them, incredibly few (actually only one that I’m aware of), have ever tried to find a solution to give editorial credit links (i.e. so called “dofollow”, or links without a restictive attribute) when there are no signs of spam.
That is until just a few days ago when I spotted an announcement by tech blogging platform Hacker Noon about their new company pages. These pages have few tidbits of information about a tech company, much like our Data Sheets, and also pull in stories on Hacker Noon that mention the company’s brand. Here’s the page for Google as an example. Notice the homepage link, if you examine the code you’ll see that it only uses the attributes “noopener” and “noreferrer” and is without an attribute that would restrict the flow of PageRank or other SEO value.
You may be reading this wondering why I would write an article about how massive tech corporations can get more link value as if they actually need any more. When I posted about this on Twitter I was given a bit of a suprise response from a member of the Hacker Noon team, Utsav Jaiswal. It would seem the lack of restrictive link rel attributes on these pages is no accident and that Hacker Noon wants to give other companies in the tech space a page with a value-passing link too.
There’s just one catch, Hacker Noon’s team has to consider your business to be a “Good Company” first.
Hacker Noon encourages tech brands to write content for their platform and engage readers there, and if this is done in a non-spammy fashion, they want to reward those businesses with a company profile page and a nice big, juicy, SEO value passing link along with it.
When I pressed for a better definition I really didn’t get much, but it would seem that editors / staff at Hacker Noon go through content and add the hashtag #good-company to posts from tech brands they believe are worthwhile, helpful, or useful to the community. If you want to be considered a Hacker Noon Good Company you can review all the content they’ve given this tag to in the past on the page for the good-company hashtag.
From my brief examination it would seem that a tech focused brand would need to write about 3 articles which are tagged as “#good-company” before being eligible for a company profile page on the website.
As a bonus it would appear sometimes editors of the site tag links in your content with the “UGC” attribute, while this seems to be a bit more rare, when it happens it is logically more likely that search engines would pass value along a UGC attribute as opposed to the “sponsored” attribute which Hacker Noon uses on most other outbound links inside content.
By allowing a pathway for brands to eventually gain an unrestricted link by proving they are good members of the community Hacker Noon is helping smaller tech-focused brands perform better in search engine rankings and helping the community at the same time. More platforms *cough* YouTube *cough* should do the same thing.
How to Get a Company Page on Hacker Noon
- Create a branded profile to contribute content to the platform.
- Write great tech-focused content that is about code, programming, and other digital topics without using that content as a sales pitch for your brand / service / product.
- Continue contributing until Hacker Noon tags at least 3 of your submissions as #good-company.
- Apply to have a Company Page created by their team.
Form to apply for a Hacker Noon Company Page: https://techcompanynewspage.paperform.co/