The Never Ending Saga of No-Follow

There are SEO experts out there that live and die by page rank sculpting. The art of driving traffic to a certain location on your website can pay off big time if you know how to do it. It takes a keen sense of content monitoring, and knowing where to no-follow.

A little more than a month ago there was much fuss about how Google was changing their view towards ‘no-follow’ links. The big ‘G’ wasn’t happy that people were using no-follow as a means to manipulate the importance of links, and the rumor is that they were going to do something about it.

This drama caused many people to get into an uproar and change everything around on their site. Fast forward to today and not much as been made about that fiasco. Now, we have an entirely different problem on our hands. Luckily for Google this concerns their rival — Bing.

While people were in an uproar over Google’s change to no-follow, people are upset at Bing for not even adhering to the no-follow tag. Because at this present moment, they’re being indexed. This is of course making all you PR sculpters cringe, as having no-follow links indexed defeats their entire purpose.

Luckily, Microsoft looks to be addressing the problem. Here’s an official statement from one of Bing’s program managers:

This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve. If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as:

http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*

Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, I’ll do the leg work for you.

So there you have it. The problem is being looked into, so you don’t have to go scrambling about trying to fix anything. Hopefully, Microsoft has enough people on their team to fix this in a timely matter. If you feel as though you can’t wait, just shoot them an email and you’ll get your quick fix.

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