Sat, 19 Jul 2008
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I have never really understood how to use nofollow links until last night. I guess I must have been very slow to pick up this technique of preserving your Google Pagerank.
On Wikipedia’s entry on nofollow links:
Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website. This is an entirely different use than it was intended originally. Nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, SEOs realized that a nofollow used for an internal link should just work as well as nofollow used for external links. It makes sense, for example, to use nofollow for internal links to pages that are not relevant for search engines and only for visitors who are already on the website. This includes pages, such as “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Terms of Use” or “Privacy Policy”. Matt Cutts, one of the initial designers of the nofollow attribute, encouraged this use of the attribute.
At the bottom of this snippet, there is a reference to an interview with Matt Cutts, in which he endorses the use of the nofollow link. Evisibility has a great blog post about nofollow tags with nice illustrations to explain the “Google Juice” theory.
Dan Thies has a free SEO book that explains the basics and advanced uses of the nofollow tag.
What I did for my own blog was to add the nofollow tag on these links:
I also made some minor changes to my blog by removing the “month chunks” plugin, which had a lot of links to my older blog archives. It would be interesting to see the effects of this minor change on the traffic of my blog and other sites.
Categories: Blog Updates, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Building on where I left off in my previous post on SEO: Quality Over Quantity, I found a good post at SEOmoz on the value of submitting to directories, link building and “nofollow links”. They interviewed Google.com’s head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, to find out more about Google’s attitude towards some SEO issues. I would pay extra attention to Matt’s reply to the following question:
What is Google’s position on the value of generic web directories that market to webmasters as a way to boost link strength, PageRank and relevance? Would you largely agree or disagree with my assertions about the value of generic web directories on the subject?
SEOmoz also has a post titled “The Wisdom and Folly of Directory Link Building“. You’ll get tips on what to look out for when selecting a directory to submit your site to. The good ones are usually very difficult to get in and they almost always require you to pay them a substantial amount of money to get reviewed with no guarantee that your link will be added. What’s worse, they might not even refund you your money if they reject your site!
Tagged As: directories, link-building, matt-cutts, nofollow-links, seo
Categories: Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
I have fallen for SEO lies told by unscrupulous marketers before and I have paid the price for it in terms of my time and money. I am sticking to the basics and I plan to keep doing what most people can’t be bothered to do. I won’t buy into crappy automation software and black hat techniques ever again.
The big lessons I learnt about SEO are:
Quality Over Quantity
Have you ever bought into the hype of a particular software that promised to blast your site to hundreds of directories to get hundreds of incoming links, increase your search engine rankings, get more traffic so that you will get more money? I have! What a waste of my time and money.
I bought into software that submits my web sites into free article directories and software that submits my articles to hundreds of article directories. I falsely believed that even though most of these directories were crap, I would at least get an almighty back link to my web site and that would be worth it. My belief back then was “a back link is better than no back link“. That was just stupid and ignorant of me!
What I discovered was Google was way smarter than all these software programmers that created these submitters. If you think you can beat Google, think again… They created their search engine and crap like this just won’t last. You can’t build a real business around a temporary loophole in their search engine algorithm.
Technically, you should have 800 plus links back to your web site if you submit to the article directories and web directories in those submitters. What they don’t tell you is Google literally ignores these links. Just do a back link check in the Google by entering “link:YOURDOMAIN.com” and you will get what I mean. Why don’t you have 800 plus incoming links listed in Google? Obviously, Google doesn’t care about 100% of these 800 plus links. Yahoo and MSN tends to detect more incoming links but the traffic they send you is very little compared to Google.
I have tested paid directory links on 4 of my content sites and left 6 other content sites without paid directory links. All 10 sites have free directory links from the list of free directories in SubmitEaze. The maximum Google PR I got for the 6 sites without paid directory links was 1 while all the 4 sites with paid directory links had PR 3-4. I paid about $100 for 2 links to each of the 4 web sites and the traffic they generate beats the pants out of the ones without them.
Therefore I came to the conclusion that paying for a submission into a high Google PR and high Alexa ranking directory is way better than submitting my web site into a few hundred free directories. The time it takes to submit to a few hundred free directories is a waste of money because I could have used that time for more productive activities.
Be Willing To Do the Hard Work
You don’t have to worry too much about your competition as much as you have to worry about your own levels of self-discipline, commitment and consistency. Hard work needs to be synonymous with productive activities that produce the results you want.
We all want more traffic to our web sites and we all know we need more incoming links. If we purely focus on getting more incoming links, we might lose our main focus of getting traffic. It was not until I asked myself “Which link back to my web site would result in more traffic?” that I began to prioritize my activities on the effective links and cut out the ineffective ones instead of blindly blasting to directories.
I used to look at a web site’s Google PR and assumed that it would be beneficial for my web site if I had a link back from a high Google PR site. What I failed to see was would that link from that high Google PR site bring me a lot of traffic? Ultimately, I want more traffic to my web site so why should I care about the Google PR when it does not indicate the traffic levels of a web site? Instead, I began to look at the Alexa rankings of a web site to determine if the link from a particular web site would be beneficial for me in terms of traffic.
It is possible to get a link to your web site from a high Google PR and high Alexa ranking site. Incoming links, search engine rankings, Google PR and everything else ultimately leads to the main goal of getting TRAFFIC. Forget that and you’ll be like me in the past - doing a lot of unproductive hard work that led to little or no productive traffic.
Tagged As: backlinks, incoming+links, search+engine+optimization, seo, traffic
Categories: Search Engine Optimization | 11 Comments »
It’s been some time since my last post. I am ready to resume blogging again after a long break. I got rid of a lot of “bad investments” to pave the way for a better year ahead. About one year ago, I updated my blog template and plugins. This year, my blog just got better with some really useful plugins I recently discovered.
There was an older version of this plugin created by someone else. The author of “Similar Posts” upgraded the older version and it is much better and easier to install than the previous one. You will see a list of similar posts on every one of my blog posts.
Sometimes a particular blog post can become a popular talking point for a lot of people. This plugin makes it easy for someone to keep updated on all the latest follow up comments via email.
3. Math Comment Spam Protection
I get loads of comment spam every week. The default anti spam plugin “Akismet” does a fairly good job of filtering comment spam but sometimes a few of them manage to sneak through the filters. This plugin forces the spammer to enter a simple math sum into a text field before his comment will be posted. This isn’t perfect but it surely will stop most “auto spam” software.
4. Simple Trackback Validation
Previously I did not receive a lot of trackback spam. I don’t even know how it works but this plugin makes sure the person blogging about something on your blog does include a link back to the exact post or your web site.
I used to have a row of cute little icons after each blog post for people to add my posts to their social bookmark accouts. I found this plugin neater because it displays the bookmark urls in a drop down menu instead. I don’t like the loading times of the icons and not everyone recognizes the logos of the social bookmarks sites they use. This one is simpler and more functional in my opinion.
I looked high and low and this is the best tagging plugin I could find on the internet. What I have implemented on my blog is only a fraction of what this plugin can do. You may also display “tag clouds” and “tag pages” for your blog.
7. Another WordPress Meta Plugin
I think the name of this plugin sounds rather silly but it works very well. I discovered that this plugin conflicts with the old “Adhesive 3.2″ plugin so if you plan to use this plugin, you need to disable “Adhesive 3.2″. Now I can add a default meta keyword and description tag for my entire blog or tags specific to each blog post only.
8. Feedburner Feed Replacement
If I could restart me blog with what I now know, I would have used FeedBurner from the start. I redirect my WordPress feed to FeedBurner. I even turn off the ping URLs in my WordPress settings because I use FeedBurner’s “PingShot” pinging service now.
9. Feed Control
My blog feed now includes my WordPress pages thanks to this plugin. I personally make use of WordPress pages in my blog. Not many people do that but I think it is necessary to separate blog content and non-blog content.
10. Filosofo Home-Page Control
This plugin lets you select a WordPress page to replace the default blog post front page. Great for turning WordPress into a regular web site instead of a blog.
11. My Page Order
This is must have plugin if you use pages and you want them to be sorted by ID. The default interface is not very good for mass updating your page IDs. You can edit your template code to sort by page titles too but this ones let’s you sort your pages by IDs in your customized order.
12. Google Sitemaps
No WordPress blog should go without this plugin. It does not make sense to use a WordPress blog and use another script or software to generate the XML sitemap for your blog. There is also a free Yahoo sitemap script that lets you generate a Yahoo-friendly text file with all the links in your blog for their new “Site Explorer” service. Remember to rename the text file to “urllist.txt” to get it to work with Yahoo.
13. Smart Archives
This plugin builds on the WordPress tag functions to create a better archive of your blog posts. Check out my archives to see how it looks like.
14. monthchunks
This plugin displays the links to the monthly blog archives of your blogs. The default list by WordPress displays them in a long list with one month per line. This one shortens it to a neat and compact list instead. Great for blogs that have a few years worth of posts.
15. wordTube
Not too long ago some internet marketing gurus were selling these video products like hotcakes. Did you know there are free video players you could use for your web site? I should cover this in greater detail in the future. You will need to download the recommended mp3 and flash video player for this to work. It even includes “Media Center” area to store all your media files.
16. WP-ContactForm
When I started this blog, I simply displayed my email on a contact page with a “spam proof” script. It did not work very well. My original email vincent at vincentrich.com was infested with spam so I had to delete it to stop wasting time deleting them. With this plugin, you will only know my email address if I reply. It makes the sorting of emails easier because you may edit the subject line to whatever you want.
These are all the plugins I use at the moment. If you have a plugin that you find very useful for WordPress, leave a comment and let us know. It would be a great time to test these plugins on my blog to see if you would like them on your blog.
Tagged As: Blogging, comment+spam, feedburner, flv, plugins, rss, seo, social+bookmarks, trackback+spam, wordpress
Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Web Development | 3 Comments »
I have been rather quiet lately and I have been hesitant about posting new content to my blog. Why? Because most of the products I have been testing are crap and I have been through quite a bit of “hell” wasting my time and money on them. I was afraid my tone would not be too positive and it would affect the whole tone of my site with all these negative posts.
I reckon over 80% of the internet marketing products I bought over the last two and a half years are nonsense. That is why you see so many negative reviews on my blog. On one hand, I don’t want to write negative reviews about people’s products because I don’t really like to step on people’s toes. My friend told me if you keep on doing this, you won’t get many joint venture offers. On the other hand, some of these internet marketing products are so crappy I feel I must share my experience with you to add some balance to all the marketing hype (lies) out there.
The worst case scenario is I write a negative review about someone’s product and that person will never invite me to do joint ventures for his products. I am fine with that because he is pushing junk to people anyway. I am not here to be a internet marketing guru who “sells shovels” to people. I don’t care about becoming famous in this internet marketing industry. My bank account will be smaller because of my unwillingness to play along with their marketing hype (lies). I believe I can live with that rather than sending “cut and paste promo emails” to my newsletter subscribers about junk products every now and then.
I feel I am now ready to resume blogging again after taking some time out from my blogs. My next post will be on how to deal with the monster RegisterFly and reviews on 4 SEO tools I tested this week. You will be surprised at which one of the 4 SEO tools is ranked the last in my opinion.
Tagged As: Internet Marketing, registerfly, search-engine-optmization, seo
Categories: Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »
I didn’t realise I have not been posting to my blog for over a month. At the end of last month, I discovered Domain Dashboard, a wonderful software to help you automate the mundane tasks of adding domains to your web host and the tracking of your web sites’ statistics.
Check out my Domain Dashboard review to find out why I give this software 2 thumbs up.
Tagged As: control-panel, cpanel, domain, domain+dashboard, google+adsense, internet+marketing, search+engine+optimization, seo, web+domain, whm
Categories: Google AdSense, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »