Startpagina.nl is one of the largest Dutch sites, it’s very popular in Holland and Belgium and many people use it. Let’s see what Wikipedia has to tell about this website:
Startpagina is a Dutch web directory, originally started by Durk Jan de Bruin. It is remarkable in function, as its structure is completely flat (there are no super- and sub-categories), and it relies in part on visitors guessing the name of the category they are looking for. For instance, the category page for encyclopedias is at (encyclopedie being Dutch for ‘encyclopedia’). The name literally means ‘start page’.
I’m not sure, but to advertise or to place a link on the index of that website (www.startpagina.nl) you will have to pay, because as their statistics tells me, they get ± 4.5 million page views per day. I’m sure it’s not that bad of an idea to advert on this website, BUT the thing I dislike about their homepage is: they use the NOFOLLOW-attribute (rel=”nofollow”), originaly created to block search engines from following links in blogs, comments, due to the amount of blog comment spamming. Just discovered that today, when yeah, checking at their source code, for no good reason.
In case you don’t know, here’s a short example of what a search engine (Google in this case) that supports the NOFOLLOW-attribute does, as written at the SearchEngineWatch:
- NOT follow through to that page.
- NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
- NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for.
Another
thing I hate about this tag is that they’re not the only one using it. Wikipedia also uses it.
My advice on this one is; well if you ever do a link exchange with another website, with the hope of getting a good backlink and or increase your link popularity, make sure they’re not using the nofollow attribute.
Here’s a real world example:
<a href=”http://www.navinpoeran.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Visit This Page</a>
Here you can see how the source code from that website looks like:
I personally don’t seem to understand as why a webmaster would implement this dumb thing in their website. If it’s implemented in a Blog or Forum, that I could understand, BUT in a webpage like www.startpagina.nl? That I don’t.
Well, if you want to advertise on that website, to get a great backlink and or greater link popularity, than don’t advertise, just seek for the free link suggestion options they have. All the other pages don’t use the nofollow-attribute as far as I have seen it. So you’d be better off than. IF you don’t care about the backlinks, or PR you might achieve, than go ahead advertise on that website, and you will surely get visitors to your webpage.
Last updated: October 23, 2009
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I think I’m going to research the behavior of other directories. Maybe there is a nice paper to write.
Cool, do that, many of those search engines didn’t yet added this attribute in their system. However the big ones, already did.
He fokker,
I am going to take you to court.
You will be so sorry you have written this peace about my company,
The Big Boss