ThisTakesTooLongToType

The fact that you are so focused on no follow actually exposes you lack of expertise in anything related to building real traffic with links. Plenty of sites have follow links, but we don’t do this for follow links. Ever heard of traffic coming from a link before? Or getting links regardless of how they affect the engines? That it is 2008 and people are still talking about the remedial web 1.0 SEO crap like follow vs no follow is amazing to me.

Keep thinking you’re right. I’ll be over here getting all the traffic you wish you had.

Your site has a 600000+ Alexa and no compete rank. You sure you want to mess with me on what works?

[…] TrackBoost Sucks for SEO […]

Maybe you shouldn’t advertise your TrackBoost software as “So frickin’ cool for SEO” when it does, in my opinion, so little for Search Engine Optimization. Think about that for a split-second. SEARCH-ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. The suggestion is that you actually focus on optimizing for search engine results so you can increase your search engine rankings and get more traffic from search engines. You advertise your software as some sort of SEO solution because you get great SEO’d backlinks that search engines love.

If you had originally positioned your software as a blog marketing tool because [insert any reason blog marketing is important], as is suggested by Mike Haydon in his Death of nofollow blog-post, then you and are not having an Internet argument; but you didn’t. You focused the marketing of the tool around its SEO capability without educating the buyer on nofollow. That’s what pissed me off more than anything.

Anyway, to recap:

1. You repeatedly said that your software is an SEO tool without educating the buyer on the nofollow tag.
2. You insulted my traffic…ouch. (FYI, my blog went up 72,000 spots since last Alexa update)
3. I replied here.

It is my opinion, (worth every bit of $1.45 for a cup of coffee), that your software should be a free WP plug-in.

For the record, I kind of like how it works and would probably use it for other sites (blogs) I run but there’s no real SEO value until nofollow dies.

Ok, my fiance told me not to be mean so I edited my response.

So posting keyword-dense, relevant posts isn’t SEO? (Google ranks them better than posts where we just “write” without focusing on KW density.)

Getting links back to your site regardless of the over-hyped use of no follow isn’t good SEO?

If you believe Google minds the no follow tag, and if you are chasing pagerank instead of high traffic links, then I guess this software is less important. But its for traffic through links. When someone has trackbacks set up properly without no follow, then you also get juice. And far more blogs have follow turned on than the panic mongers in SEO are touting.

It works man. It really does. Contrary to most software creators, we’ve actually tested it.

I don’t care about whether a link is nofollowed or not, I’ll take a link from wikipedia anyday.

I like TrackBoost. I use TrackBoost. Maybe I missed the part where Jack didn’t position it for blog marketing. I thought he did. Anyway, it is a great help for my blog.

I thought Jack positioned TrackBoost as a tool to help build conversation across different domains. Well it’s working here!

What’s really funny is that I agree with pretty much everything both David and Jack are saying (except when they are sledging each other… then it’s just plain funny lol). Maybe sit back and read your comments as if you aren’t each having a go at each other, and you’ll see you are basically saying the same thing, which is…

it’s all about traffic. NoFollow is dead (or so weakened it’s irrelevant), the traditional use of NoFollow to “sculpt” pagerank is a waste of time.

I’m off to find a WP plugin that automatically gets rid of the nofollow. Seeya

Mike - when you find that plugin, let me know! I’ve tried several of the FREE wordpress plugins, and none are even worth what I paid for them. Pretty much uninstalled all of them.

I agree with David, Jack made it looked like his software was the next great thing for SEO and getting traffic. It has very little value for SEO and if I were him, I would give this software away for free in exchange from links coming from where the software is used as a plug in.

David, thank you for your honest review, it really opened my eyes and I hope others do too, if they want a piece of software to scrap some content to their sites easily, then Jack’s software is a good match for them, but if they want to do anything related to SEO, I think you are right, they better spend the money on something else.

Joe

As the only person here who actually has used TrackBoost (other than the creator), here’s my 2 cents on it…

TrackBoost isn’t one of these trashy programs whose purpose is to scrape content. Sure it can be used for the wrong things, but so can ANYTHING (even our beloved wordpress *gasp*). That’s the fault of the user, not the software.

I do pretty much everything through wordpress, so TrackBoost is a huge help for me. It saves so much time researching quality posts to link to… posts that I would/should be linking to anyway, but often times hadn’t got around to doing it because it was so time-consuming.

I’ve only been using TrackBoost for a few days, and only on selected posts, and already I’ve got a comment saying how great it was the way I tied the related posts together. I just followed Jack’s video on suggested ways to use TrackBoost.

I think TrackBoost is a great tool. While I’m all in favor of free stuff, the fact is that TrackBoost is way more sophisticated than any of the plugins out there (and calling it a plugin is way off base - it’s a desktop application that your wordpress site plugs into, not the other way around). It’s so helpful that I’m “happy” to pay to get it.

Jack’s “problem” (if you want to call it that) is that he’s so good at web 2.0 “SEO” that he has forgotten that some people actually still believe in the web 1.0 nonsense.

David clearly has seen the light and knows that all that “gaming the system” nonsense from web 1.0 is a waste of time.

I respect both of you. Your ideas are both right on track IMHO.

You are both coming from the same position, attacking the outdated place, thinking that the other is there. I think it’s coz of Jack’s use of SEO to be slanted towards traffic, rather than SERPs.

Thanks David for raising this issue. You and Jack have got me thinking about what SEO really is today.

Well, I did not mean to start a firestorm of controversy with this blog post. Maybe we can all discuss religion and politics instead?

An update: I think Mike Haydon is right on about taking initiative to personally kill nofollow on our blogs. The fact is, (after a tiny bit of research), I think nofollow may be treated differently nowadays anyway. Google’s got this whole “Authority Hub” thing I haven’t quite figured out but I think it has something to do with a lot of external links to related resources. I’m still waiting for a call back from Matt Cutts so he can clue me in.

I have removed the auto-nofollow from my WP install. You too can learn how to remove automatic nofollow in Word Press by following the link.

As far as TrackBoost goes; I believe it is a useful tool for helping with blog-posts and getting links back for users to follow kind of like the way a Twitter would work. And, it helps your reader find related material, (if chosen wisely). But, for the clinical definition of “search engine optimization” it’s not a good tool.

One could make the argument that search is a dying technology but you would probably be too far ahead of the curve to find any customers there so consider that the top 3 spots in Google for whatever you are selling is going to be like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow…but almost just has difficult to obtain. If you have any doubts about that then perhaps you can try living without search for a week like the RumblePup guy did.

Summation: TrackBoost is valuable for traffic but as an SEO tool…I don’t think it’s quite rock-star ready.

Go buy it and let me know. [insert affiliate link] whoops…too bad my backspace doesn’t work.

David

How about Utility Poster? The cheaper of the two tools is clearly great for SEO. It’s super easy to create reference and resource lists with that tool that contain keyword rich content.

At the time of this comment I ranked 7th for TrackBoost so I changed the name of the post. I don’t think people make a decision based solely on my review of a product I have never even used. The fact is that I have received a good deal of traffic from the trackbacks I posted in the article.

I still don’t think it’s an SEO tool; but I do believe it could be a very useful traffic tool.

Is this where my affiliate link goes???

@ Joel McDonald - I found a solution that works for me. I posted the whole solution including plugins and a way to deal with good comments that link to spam/porn sites (I get a few of them) and it’s not just through Akismet. See How To Be NoFollow Free.

@ David - I had a look at your auto remove noFollow solution and with all due respect… that looks too hard man IMHO Plus every time you upgrade WP, you have to change the code all over again. Let me know what you think of the solution I proposed (see above).

I think you are spot on with your analysis of noFollow. As for controversy… isn’t that what they call “link bait”? It’s a good thing to stir up a bit of controversy every now and then - gets ppl actually thinking about the issues, rather than accepting things at face value. Ironically, Jack Humphrey has done quite a bit of work/research in that area

Hey ladies:-) Stop fighting, I have been using Trackboost for my health and beauty blog and it has benefit my blog alot:

It saves me alot of time in finding relevants post’s that I want to link to.

I did not spend any time in finding trackbacks before since it takes to much time so Trackboost is a good thing in my book.

I am not an seo guru like you guy’s, but don’t you think Google gives our post two thumps up when we link to relevant post’s ?

Or should we be selfish?

one feuture that like within the trackboost is that I can choose if i want to follow or no-follow,

But i allways pick follow that link since i belief that sharing is a good thing for everybody.

I want to say one thing about Jack is that he is one of very few marketers that is honest in his teaching,

intresting discussion on this topic guy’s.

Sorry for my english, I am an Icelandic.

Warmly

Thordur Mocan