I recently stumbled upon a well written and very interesting article about some recent SEO sob stories. Most of the issues center around excessive links, paid links, linking through keywords, and not using the rel=”nofollow” tag when displaying paid links. Essentially, Google came up with a way to tweak their algorithm to devalue link farming and excessive linking that do not use the rel=”nofollow” attribute properly.

The article is well written, detailed, and very interesting to those in the digital advertising sector; written by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University .

Google’s public stance has always been to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute when you do not want the link to contribute to the link’s PR. This is yet another reason to use a reputable SEO firm and don’t rely on companies who improve your SERP by excessive reciprocal and back linking.

As always, make sure you understand what you are doing! and why you are doing it!