Reviewer of Sites

Googles Sounds the Death ‘knol’?

First, what is Knol?

Knol is a Squidoo/Wikipedia-like social media site brought to you by Google. Currently in beta, it is supposed to be a haven for authors to show off their writing skills and portfolios. Google introduced it to a select group of people in December of 2007. Here what Google had to say about it:

It is a “free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.”

What effect will it have on the likes of Squidoo, Hubpages, and Wikipedia?

Since this is a Google project, you can expect a ton of money, advertising, and support once it is finally released. There are already sites out there trying to capitalize on Knol, such as knolstuff. There are also sites that appear to be trying to convince people to join their site instead, and knol isn’t even out yet. Hubpages asks visitors to not wait for Google Knol message; “Why wait for Google Knol? Write your own Wiki pages on HubPages and Earn.” I could see Knol cutting into the Hubpages and Squidoo potential users, as they do not have the name recognition, however Wikipedia is very well entrenched. I think there will be a lot of buzz on the internet, especially within the writer and blogger communities, but I do not believe it will kill most sites (that have an established community), unless they are not already fairly well known.

Tags: Google, Social Bookmarking by reviews
7 Comments »

You may be familiar with the owners of SEO.com reportedly paying $5 Million for the domain. Yes, that’s a lot of money. As it turns out, Mike Mann, the owner of SEO.com did not pay quite that much. However, he is still a really wealthy individual from his days in the domain industry.

News report from the time of the announcement:

Mike Mann is a prominent internet entrepreneur who sold BuyDomains company a few years ago for more than $65 million. His latest tech venture is just that, a venture capital firm based in Washington D.C. which goes by the name of WashingtonVC.

Yesterday Mann announced the purchase of SEO.com by WashingtonVC for $5 million as well as the formation of an SEO firm led by Dave Bascom. The company is formerly known as Web Targeted, search engine optimization company located in Utah. Jay mentions this new domain will give them a huge advantage over the fierce competition of Search Engine Optimizers.

Just the same, as far as SEO is concerned, it has the perfect domain name, is owned by one of the wealthiest people in the domain and SEO industries, and has a quickly growing forum.

So, if you are thinking about joining, this is the time to do it while it’s still young!

Please click the logo to join

Tags: Domains, Internet, SEO by reviews
11 Comments »

Other Ways to block search engine spiders from crawling

Actually, NoFollow does not “stop” the search engine spiders (robots) from crawling, but instead Google and others simply do not pass “link juice” to the backlink.

However, as Geoland points out so well, there are other ways to block the crawling of links. The other methods are much more limiting than rel="nofollow", because at least NoFollow still allows the crawling and indexing.

Normal methods to check for NoFollow will not show you if a link is truly crawlable (including SEOQuake, right-clicking on a link and looking at properties, etc). In other words, “what you see is not always what you get.”

Robots.txt

One method is to use Robots.txt to control the crawling of spiders. Robots.txt is kept in the top level of the domain.

Examples

Blocks all robots

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Blocks all robots from crawling specific directories

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /tmp/

Disallow: /administrator/

Meta Elements

The robots attribute is used to control whether or not the search engine spiders are allowed to index a page and whether or not they should follow links from a page. The NOINDEX value prevents a page from being indexed, while the NOFOLLOW prevents links from being crawled.

The robots attribute is supported by all of the major search engines. In addition there are several additional values for the robots meta attribute that are relevant to search engines, such as NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET, which are meant to tell search engines what not to do with a web pages content. Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of your website. A more reliable and efficient method is the use of the Robots.txt file.

NOINDEX tag tells a search engine not to index a specific page.

NOFOLLOW tag tells a search engine not to follow the links on a specific page.

NOARCHIVE tag tells a search engine not to store a cached copy of your page.

NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your a search engine listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results.

Example

<html>

<head>

<title>Create Backlinks to My Site</title>

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

</head>

Javascript

Any link written in javascript is not crawlable by search engine spiders. It will look like a normal link and will not be lined through (SEOQuake addon) or highlighted (Search Status addon)

Dynamic URLs

Some spiders may also avoid crawling any url that has a “?” in it (dynamically produced) in order to avoid spider traps which may then cause the crawler to download an ‘infinite’ number of URLs from a Web site. Thus it would probably prevent links on these pages from being crawled.

Tags: Google, Link Building, SEO, Yahoo by reviews
12 Comments »

First, what is linkbait?

Linkbait is simply creating something that sparks peoples’ interest enough that they would create a link to you or use something that you offer, such as an image or a tool. They may knowingly or unknowingly create a backlink to your site.

With Google’s Matt Cutts doing a writeup of linkbait recently and an older one, it made me think more about it. The real thing always serves as the best example, rather than just explaining it. This seems to be an acceptable way of getting links, according to Google.

Here’s his definition: “On a meta-level, I think of “linkbait” as something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are a lot of ways to do that, including putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights, or it can be as simple as being creative. You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it, though). Sometimes even a little bit of work can generate a reason for people to link to you.”

Examples of Linkbait

www.stclaire.com – PR4 – Links 2,630



Matt Cutts used this “Technical Communications” site that had a clever sign making section.

[Read more →]

Tags: Link Building, Marketing, SEO, Traffic by reviews
5 Comments »

DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites

The following are Social Bookmarking Sites that provide dofollow backlinks to your site. As always, it is important to provide good content to these sites, as well as being relevant content to yours. Most importantly, we should not abuse or misuse these Social Bookmarking sites.

Are these really “DoFollow”? Read this to see other ways of blocking the spiders.

Ok, as I add new ones (or take away bad ones), then the number changes.

• Slashdot PR9
• Mister-Wong PR7
• Furl PR7
• Bibsonomy PR7
• Spurl PR6
• Unalog PR6 – Registration not currently available (thanks dauclair)
• Jumptags PR6
• Searchles PR6
• Plime PR5
• BlogHop PR5
• MyLinkVault PR5
• A1 Webmarks PR5
• ClipClip PR5
• Diigo PR5
• Listible PR5
• MyVmarks PR5
• Complore PR4
• OnMyList PR4
• Kapely PR3
  
• info4it PR3
• MyPIP PR3
• SyncOne PR3
• Yattle PR2
• Faves PR0
• UPCHUCKr PR0

NoFollow – How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document”.

What is a good way to check if a link is Nofollow? Download Firefox

Install the Firefox SEOQuake Plugin from the tools page.

You may also like the DoFollow Forums List
*If you notice any changes or possible additions, please post a comment.

Tags: Link Building, Marketing, SEO, Social Bookmarking by reviews
20 Comments »

First of all, what is canonicalization? Canonicalization (abbreviated c14n) is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation.

Example:

[[Egg_salad]]

[[egg salad]]

[[  egg_salad  ]]

As you will notice, each of these are slightly different from one another.

In terms of the URL it is the interpretation of variations of the same url, as seen below. The concern is that Google sees the different variants of the same url in the same way. It’s important to create consistency across your website URLs so you

From Matt Cutt’s Page

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q: Is there anything else I can do?
A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

Essentially, you would want to canonicalize the following situations:

• Canonicalize the domain (e.g. redirect non-www and IP address to www)
• Canonicalize my index pages (redirect “/index.html” to “/”)
• Remove spurious query strings (e.g. example.com/1234? to a static html page)
• Correct any typos in type-in URLs
• Correct outdated or otherwise incorrect query strings
• Correct invalid inbound links
• Suppress the fix-up redirect if the resulting URL does not resolve to an existing file
• Adjust capitalization of the URL to all lowercase. In some cases, this matters.

Tags: SEO, Web Design by reviews
2 Comments »

As you may know, Google implemented the nofollow tag a few years ago, but a short time later, others chose to create what is known as Dofollow, which is really nothing more than purposely allowing the “link juice” to pass from one site to another or, at least, not hindering it.

The definition of nofollow:

nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.

As a possible incentive or through a lack of desire to block links in forums, some forum owners and moderators have decided to allow backlinks within a forum post or within the signature (aka sig). One reason for having nofollow links and/or not allowing sigs in a forum is to prevent spam.

For this reason, I do not encourage or condone the abuse of these forums. I see it as a perk for actively taking part in the forum. Along with possibly getting some “link juice”, you may get some traffic from readers of your posts, especially from forums related to your links.

What is a good way to check if a link is Nofollow? Download Firefox

Install the Firefox SEOQuake Plugin from the tools page.

I have organized a list of dofollow forums into categories and alphabetized it. It is a permanent page within this site and will continue to be updated.

List of DoFollow Forums

Tags: Link Building, Marketing by reviews
6 Comments »