Weblog Tools Collection blog is asking if pinging your own previously published posts is a good idea. Their consideration is the updated Google’s ranking algorithm which decreases the rating of sites to which it has ‘nofollow’ links – exactly the kind that pingback creates.
In my understanding, whenever you have a choice between improved search engine optimization (SEO) and improved user experience, always go for the user experience. Pingbacks provide a valuable navigation path to updated content. This is a way for the author to say that there is a development to the story or a much related content is available elsewhere on the site.
If Google, or any other search engine, penalizes such behaviour, I am more than sure that this is very temporary. Even technically, making an exception to nofollow links within the same domain is a trivial change.
Getting rid of pingbacks to your own posts can and will seriously harm visitor’s navigation of the site. And that would decrease your page views, incoming links, and everything else that is related to human activity. Do you still have the question of pingbacks unanswered?
it’s not that google penalizes you for the self pingbacks. it’s just that the page rank is divided between all the links on a page even if the ones with “nofollow” don’t actually get it. This actually makes the links without “nofollow” get less page rank. If you remove the pingbacks there will be less links on your page so the other links get more pagerank.
Of course with the number of links we have even on a single post page now having one more link with nofollow doesn’t make such a big difference.
I like pingbacks and I’m not going to remove them from my blog but it makes sense that the links from the self pingbacks get the pagerank that is now lost on them so this is why I created this plugin: http://patchlog.com/wordpress/follow-self-pings/
Mihai,
thanks for the clarification.