AboutUs.org: Follow removed from links & exciting new venture

AboutUs.org have put me on an emotional roller coaster this week (well, not quite – that’s a slight exaggeration!) But there have been two big announcements over the last seven days, one good and the other a little disappointing.
AboutUs.org
Unfortunately the latter involves AboutUs.org’s newly launched ProFollow service, which I blogged about a couple of weeks ago!

ProFollow is NoFollow – but not for long (hopefully!)

On Saturday morning I woke up to a lovely email from AboutUs.org’s Kristina, who’d taken time to personally write and send me a message about the company’s decision to temporarily stop giving out free follow links to people who’d taken the time to edit their AboutUs.org pages.

She referred me to the official blog post on AboutUs.org, which states:

We decided to stop following all external links after discovering that Google may regard our Spotlight article service as a form of link selling. Link selling isn’t normal web advertising. A link seller provides inbound links to a site specifically to manipulate search engine results.

So, there you have it.  No more lovely, free follow links – but is this just for now?

The blog post does continue:

It’s possible we’ll reconsider our decision in the future, and remove the NoFollow attribute on pages edited by AboutUs visitors

Phew!  Let’s hope they do find a way to still reward AboutUs.org visitors without Google assuming they’re selling links.  After all, any ‘juice’ being passed from the ProFollow scheme would have been worth nothing if AboutUs.org couldn’t maintain a decent PageRank for its content because of ‘link selling’ anyway.

And now for the good news… AboutUs launch new project:

So, still wallowing in the disappointment from the revoked ProFollow scheme, you can imagine my excited little face when I looked at FaceBook and found that AboutUs.org had launched a new side project – AboutUs.com!

Now we’ve got something new for you: AboutUs.com. It’s all about the essence of websites, as understood – and conveyed – by different people.

Ooh, very interesting!  It’s essentially a platform that collates your ‘insights’ about websites, written in 120 characters or less.

Somebody has written the obligatory ‘it’s just like Twitter’ comment on the FaceBook page – and I guess it is a little similar to Twitter, yes. (120 character limit, for example.)  But this isn’t yet another microblogging service.  It’s a service to explain what you think is great or rubbish about other websites, which are then all collected and presented together on a page for that particular domain name.

So, naturally, I had to take advantage and put:

Super Carly AboutUs.com

But that’s just my opinion.  If you disagree, you may write something different like ‘SuperCarly.co.uk is run by a smelly girl that likes smelly dogs’, or something equally as derogatory.  Or if you love my blog, you could write ‘SuperCarly.co.uk is run by an amazingly fantastic girl called Carly’, which is more preferential!

You get the point.

Of course, this website could have a more practical application then simply a platform on which to call me names; use it to find out if a website is fraudulent or scammy, search to find the shop with the best reviews or simply use it to find new places to surf.

Fantastic.  Never risk buying overpriced shoes again,  learn which Bingo site is the best and find fun new places to hang out!

Oh and let me know if you sign up to add any insights: simply leave your URL in the comments and I’ll even give you a vote!!

Oh and yes, I did notice that AboutUs.com is providing websites with a follow link – I just didn’t want to point it out, jinx it and have them take it away, so shhhh 😀

Free follow links from Aboutus.org

Aboutus.org have now started giving away follow links for FREE.

They’ve launched a new ‘Profollow‘ scheme, which I seriously recommend all SEOs take advantage of!

The scheme encourages users to create unique and valuable content on Aboutus.org and in return they’ll get follow links for free.

You can read Aboutus.org’s reasoning behind the scheme on their blog post entitled ‘Aboutus wants to give you link love!

But hang on…What is Aboutus.org?Aboutus.org Logo

Aboutus.org is a collaborative wiki where users can edit pages about websites.

It’s essentially a Wikipedia for pages on the World Wide Web.

If you’ve never heard of aboutus.org, let me quote their mission statement:

To build the world’s most comprehensive, collaborative guide to the best places on the world wide web. We invite everyone to engage with our wiki: whether you’re an organization, business, non-profit or individual. Come see why the knowledge of many makes us one of the fastest-growing and most powerful websites on the internet today. It’s easy to participate because you can edit our pages!

How to get your FREE follow links:

All you have to do is log-in to (or create) your account, find the Wiki page for your website, edit the default description for your site (usually based on Meta Data which it scrapes) and email the team to say you’d like to be rewarded with free follow links for your efforts!  Of course, don’t spend two minutes making changes; write as much as you can and make sure it’s unique content.  Above all, make your page interesting – you want to captivate random visitors and MAKE them click through to your site.

Is it worth it?  Why should I bother?

Free follow links are a great reward for taking the time to edit wiki pages about your site.  Billions of page authors won’t take up this opportunity, so make sure you do!  Google will notice that Aboutus.org ARE following you and not thousands of others, so they’ll see the link as a positive vote!

But that’s not all:

The unique content you write will lead to more coverage in the SERPS:  if you’re in first place for your keyword, let your Aboutus.org page be second.  More coverage for you equals less exposure for your competitors!

Use your aboutus.org page to tell people what your site is about. This will help people who aren’t sure what your mission is and who don’t really understand why they need to sign up with you.

Finally, a nice glowing aboutus.org page can help your reputation.  If your site has some less-than-lovely reviews, you may want to embark on a bit of reputation management.  Use sites like Aboutus.org to boost good things in the search engines and knock that bad press off Google’s first page.  (Of course, if all other 199,999,999 results in Google for your company are bad reviews, you might want to start listening!)

Feel free to show off your Aboutus.org pages in the comments below!