The theory behind this is that you protect your site from linking to ‘bad neighbourhoods’ an possibly incurring penalties with Google for spammy links. Rel=”nofollow” is your way of saying – as the site owner – that you can’t vouch for the quality of those links.

Anyway, you probably already know the reasoning – let’s show you how to set this up.

Configuring Nofollow On Input Filters

Yes, that’s right. The “nofollow” attribute is configured on Input filters. Go to your Drupal administration pages and browse to Site Configuration -> Input Formats.

Normally you want the default Input Format set to Filtered HTML for user-generated content. This allows your users the ability to use HTML formatting without having access to insert scripts or other disruptive things on the site.

1. Click on the configure button for Filtered HTML. You’ll see under the Filters heading that a number of filters are activated. If the HTML Filter isn’t activated, then activate it and save your changes.
2. Click the Configure button at the top of the page and you’ll see how the filter is currently configured.
3. Activate the option for Spam link deterrent and save the settings. All outgoing links will now have rel=”nofollow” applied to them.

Refining With Access Permissions

If you want to be especially clever about it, you could modify permissions so that regular members and anonymous users get the Filtered HTML input by default but set your ‘trusted members‘ up with access to a less restrictive Input Format such as Full HTML.

But that’s a conversation for another day, folks…

When I installed the Unreality TV Forum, the first thing I did was to make the layout fixed-width for better legibility. The liquid layout of most forum themes results in long lines that are difficult to read without getting cataracts or worse! But that’s a usability thing.

The first thing I’m tackling for SEO reasons is titling. The page title is correct – it follows the format of the topic title. But on-page, the title is repeated loads of times, but not once with any sort of semantic meaning. I’m talking about the H1 tag here.

How do we tell Google what the page is about? Kick it off with a title wrapped in <h1></h1>. The problem with SMF themes is that they’re badly commented and hard to navigate. So here’s how I do it.

Theme Inheritance

There is a default theme included with SMF that all other themes derive from. The template that handles topic display is called display.template.php. If you want to customise this template, never do it to the default version – always copy the file to your custom theme folder.

The way inheritance works is that SMF will look for a customised display template first. If it doesn’t find one, it’ll revert to the default. So, bearing that in mind, let’s begin.

Take a copy of the display.template.php from the default theme folder and copy it into your current theme folder. We’ll edit this file to override the default forum topic display.

Hacking The Topic Display Template

Round about line 208 on the display template, there’s a bit of code that displays the topic title and the number of views that topic has had.

<td valign="middle" width="85%" style="padding-left: 6px;" id="top_subject">        ', $txt[118], ': ', $context['subject'], ' &nbsp;(', $txt[641], ' ', $context['num_views'], ' ', $txt[642], ')</td>

What I did was to take out the number of views and put that piece of code elsewhere. Once that was done, I wrapped the resulting code in <h1> tags, giving some semantic richness to the topic title.

The modified code (minus the page views) is this:

<td valign="middle" width="85%" style="padding-left: 6px;" id="top_subject">        <h1 class="topictitle">', $context['subject'], '</h1></td>

Now, I made this change to our forum less than a week ago. I want to give Google a bit of time to reindex the site and take into account the new page structures. It’ll be interesting to see if this relatively simple change makes a long term difference to ranking on the forum.

Hacking The Forum Users

One of the biggest problems in running a forum is that you give up control over input to your members. And your members are probably not SEO aware.

I had a word with some of our power members and asked them to be more thorough with their titles – including full names and details where possible. I didn’t approach this as an SEO issue – I approached it as a usability issue. Because we republish our latest forum headlines on the Unreality blogs, it was important that those topics made sense to any readers browsing the website.

So, we approached this from a usability point of view, which is correct. But we also hopefully gain SEO benefits.

Other SMF Hacks

There are a couple of other things I’d like to hack in SMF if I could. One is the poor URLs the system generates. The other is a full semantic reworking of the topic display template so that it’s not completely dependent on table-based layouts. If anybody’s done any work on this kind of thing, I’d love to hear it.

Currently, I’m using Yahoo! for my everyday searches, supplemented by Microsoft’s Live.com.

One of the biggest benefits of using alternative search engines is seeing different results. I’d gotten tired of Google showing Wikipedia as the first result for virtually everything. Yahoo! and Live don’t give Wikipedia nearly as much weight as Google does, so that’s a major bonus – other sites manage to rise to the top of the results pages.

Anyway, since I’m using Yahoo! much more, I was pleased to come across this guide on the Yahoo! search blog which shows you how to get better results out of your search queries. Here’s an overview:

1. Advanced search queries: terms you can add to your search to filter for specific results. You can use square brackets to specifiy the order of words in the search. For example [gerard mcgarry] will find "Gerard McGarry", but not "McGarry Gerard".
2. Package tracking: Tracking UPS, FedEx and USPS deliveries directly from the search bar.
3. Definitions & Synonyms: Type define or definition along with your query to get a dictionary style definition of a word.
4. Exclude terms: This works in the standard way – if you want to exclude a term from your search type the word with a minus sign in front of it.
5. Travel information: You can get a host of travel information including a flight tracker, traffic status and maps.
6. Quick links to Yahoo! services: Type the name of the Yahoo service you require and an exclamation mark immediately after to visit that Yahoo! service. For example, a search for ‘news!‘ will take you directly to Yahoo News.
7. Open Shortcuts: Similar to the technique in point 6, you can automatically search a specific site using this. Search Wikipedia for information about The Wombles by using the search ‘!wiki The Wombles‘. To search for variations on this type of query, do a search for ‘!list‘

Not a bad set of tips for getting the most out of Yahoo!. The one thing I’ve noticed is missing (to my knowledge) is the calculator and currency converter functionality. If I find a way to do this, I’ll let you know!

So, I’m officially an…

SEO Professional – 74%

I’m feeling a little smug about that news. Understandably.

Heritage Quilts is a small business run by my client, Briege Kelly. She’s a dedicated quiltmaker and allows orders via the OSCommerce store I set up for her over a year ago.

It’s always nice to see such good search engine results for clients. Ranking highly for important search engine terms can attract new customers to your company and create business opportunities that you wouldn’t otherwise have.

Search engine behavior studies frequently prove that if you’re not on the first page of search results, you’re much less likely to get discovered by searchers. Most queries in Google are satisfied by results on the first page, so your position is everything when it comes to the web.

Ranking For Your Business Name

On a related note, don’t make the mistake of thinking that ranking first for your business name is an SEO achievement. It isn’t.

The only people who’ll search for your business by name are those that already know about you. With local clients, I always try to focus on ranking for their industry terms in the town or county relevant to their business. For example: “Accountants, Antrim”, “Architects in Ballymena”.

These are the types of searches new customers might do when searching for a supplier in their area. And these are the types of terms you need to be targeting.

Any questions?

For me however, the most useful feature of the plugin highlights links that have had rel=”nofollow” applied to them. This can be useful when doing link building campaigns. For instance, take a look at del.icio.us and StumbleUpon – both universally apply nofollow to all links except internal ones. There’s no PageRank value in those types of links, although there may be a short term traffic boost from submitting your site to them.

If you use SEO For FireFox, you’ll be stunned at the number of sites that apply nofollow on outgoing links. Naturally, blog comments are mostly nofollowed, but sites like YouTube also apply nofollow.

Changing the highlighter color – can be done by going to Tools, Options in Firefox and clicking the Options button on the SEO For Firefox entry. The default red is quite shocking when you see it splashed across a page, but it makes text unreadable.

I prefer to switch it to a lighter color for better legibility. When you update the options, the new highlighted color is applied upon the next page refresh.

Providing a sitemap to the search engines basically gives them an inventory of the pages in your site. It’s useful in helping them to find and index older and possibly orphaned content in your website that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to find.

Basic XML Sitemap Setup

• First, download the Google Sitemap module for Drupal. Upload the gsitemap folder to your Drupal installation into sites/all/modules. If the modules folder doesn’t exist, you may need to create it.
• Once you’ve uploaded the module, go to Administer | Site Building | Modules, and activate the module labelled XML Sitemap.
• Now, you’ll need to configure the module. Got to Administer | Site Configuration | XML Sitemap and set the options accordingly. By default, the “Submit To Google” option is selected, but you might also want to automatically submit to Yahoo! and Ask. In fact, I recommend it. You should also select to submit sitemap when the site is updated and when cron is run. Cron tasks in Drupal automatically perform regular maintenance on your Drupal installation. It’s recommended to set this up. (I may cover this in a later article)

Problems I Encountered During Sitemap Configuration

After following those ‘default’ steps to setup, I attempted to access my sitemap. No luck, it gave a parse error in FireFox. Upon further investigation, the file was empty. So the sitemap hadn’t been generated. If you encounter this problem, try these steps:

• Browse to Administer | Site Configuration | File System.
• In the Temporary Directory box, remove the forward-slash character from the start of /tmp. Save the new settings. You should see a notice that “The directory tmp has been created”
• Try to access your sitemap file again (should be at http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). This time you should see the sitemap that has been generated.
• Now that the sitemap has been created, you can force a cron run to ping Google, Yahoo! and Ask. Simply visit Administer | Logs | Status Reports and click the link that says “run cron manually”. Follow this up by viewing the Recent Log Entries Report where you should see a number of entries confirming submission to the various search engines.

For bonus points, you could (and should) configure your robots.txt file for sitemap autodiscovery.

And to put her money where her mouth is, she’s barring the big engines from indexing her site so that it won’t appear in their results pages. The minx.

Jennifer previously wrote a series of posts about building a successful online business in 30 days, and she cracked that task. Her breastfeeding blog now brings in over $1,000 per month in revenue. She cites two main reasons for embarking on this anti-Google experiment:

First, those four engines are not the only sources of search traffic. Blog engines like Technorati, smaller search engines and directories and the search features within social media sites like Flickr and YouTube all serve up traffic and leads to web sites. Things like good old fashioned link building also come into play. I’ll also be exploring more areas of social media marketing including creative ways to market within communities without crossing the line from helpful member to annoying advertiser.

Second, the work that I do on this site in the early months will lay the foundation for solid search engine rankings down the road. Nearly every business finds their way into the major engines eventually. The goal here is to build the type of content and link foundations that will help the site quickly rise to the top when we do allow the spiders to come in and play.

I’m intrigued to see how this experiment will pan out and what techniques Jennifer will use in building up her business using predominantly social means. And, of course, I’ll be watching to see if she uses entirely above board techniques, or if she’ll dip her toes in ethically shady territory.

However, the glaringly obvious criticism of Jennifer’s approach is that she has the exposure of Search Engine Journal to help her market the site initially. For the rest of us, we’d be starting a little bit behind Jennifer, as this latest project will receive a fair bit of attention from the SEO world.

Oh, the site? It’s called Bento Yum. There’s a backlink for you Jennifer!

Basically, Darren sets a fairly wide topic and asks his readers to make submissions, link back to relevant posts and comment on blog posts they particularly like. I decided to get involved this time and write a Top 5 type of post. I’ll be the first to admit it wasn’t the most inspired nor was it my best writing to date. Participation was the most important thing in this instance.

Who’d have guessed the effect that Darren’s project would have? There were some 893 entries in total. The buzz was palpable as people flocked to each other’s blogs and discovered new material, left comments and linked back to each other.

I decided to do some analysis on my Top 5 Essential Sites for Bloggers post. I received a small amount of comments (but an increase nonetheless). The most interesting outcome was the backlinks. According to Technorati, I had something like 30 extra backlinks to the blog. I did a further check in Yahoo! Site Explorer and discovered 47 inbound links to that post.

Needless to say, I’m chuffed to see such an increase in the amount of backlinks to this blog.

I was surprised that so many people chose to repost Darren’s post in its entirety. Several people wrote lists of the posts they liked best from the writing project and included mine. All in all, the results of the ProBlogger effect are:

1. Moderate increase in traffic – no servers were harmed in the course of this experiment!
2. Increase in comments to the blog.
3. Whoa! Pingbacks galore!
4. More power in Technorati! Not that I care, but as I was watching the backlinks grow, I noticed my Technorati authority grew from 24 to 57.

I’d say for better posts there was the opportunity to go totally viral and wind up on Digg, del.icio.us, etc. I haven’t noticed it here on Scribble, but other blogs may notice an increase in RSS readership, especially the winning entrant.

Smart webmasters know that by getting their sites listed on the ‘popular’ lists means a major influx of traffic, which can result in:

• Increases in RSS subscribers. A number of sites have documented a rise in subscribers after a post becomes popular on a social media site.
• Increased links back to your site. Many bloggers find things to write about on social media sites. If you’re popular, expect lots of nice links back from other blogs.
• Google Juice. The increased backlinks will ultimately result in better PageRank with Google and therefore higher placement in search engine listings.
• Reputation. As all these factors come into play, your site has the potential to become a trusted resource and this can all reinforce your reputation as an expert in your niche.
• Better advertising revenue. Maybe not immediately – social media users are an ad-blind crowd. But increased traffic and better SERP placement is likely to see better advertising opportunities over time.

As you can see, there is a lot to gain from leveraging social media sites. Note that I didn’t say ‘exploiting’ social media sites.

Seeding

Seeding is the practice of submitting links to social media and bookmarking services like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Reddit. There are countless others, although the impact of seeding is less if the service is less popular. Which explains why attaining the Digg front page is the goal for many bloggers!

Seeding becomes controversial when you’re only promoting your own site, or you’re seen to be submitting stuff purely to gain traffic. This is frowned upon by the users and moderators of social bookmarking services for a very good reason – it’s considered to be spamming. And everybody hates spammers.

The only exception to this rule is if you’re creating quality content and otherwise participating in the community. If you’ve created a unique article or post that will offer real value to visitors, then there’s nothing wrong with seeding your own pages. Nicer if someone else submits it for you though.

My Suggestions For Ethical Bookmarking

• Limit your activity. Not all social networking services will yield a result, and some are barely used at all. Why waste time with multiple submissions – you could be creating great content!
• Participate in the community. There’s a reason they call it Social Bookmarking – it’s all about people and connections. Find people with similar interests, comment where you can and build a solid friend list. You might actually enjoy it…
• Don’t just seed your own stuff. Share the resources you find interesting, particularly in your niche. It’ll vary your submission list and it’s a great way to reward other bloggers whose writing you admire. If you only seed your own stuff, you’ll look like a spammer.
• Be inspired by the community. Lots of bloggers get their inspiration from their social bookmarking tool of choice. They can also discover great writing in their area that they might never have found before. All this can generate ideas for you to write about and experiments to try on your own website.
• Above all, don’t spam. Not every post is worth submitting to a social bookmarking service. Shorter posts, or link posts that point out a resource but don’t offer any real insight are examples of this.
• Hope that people start to seed your pages. The Holy Grail of Ethical Bookmarking – in my opinion – is when people start watching your blog or website and seed your links for you. Word of mouth is better than self-promotion any day of the week!
• Seed other people’s pages. Reward websites and writers that you enjoy by bookmarking their work. It’ll give them all the benefits listed above, and your Digg account won’t look quite so spammy!

Start Your Ethics Engines

Creating an account on every social bookmarking service available is counter productive, spammy and a waste of time. I believe that you’ll really only see benefits from social bookmarking if you’re participating in the community. That means seeding other people’s pages, commenting on posts and building up a network of friends.

Also, by focussing on one or two particular sites, you stand a greater chance of success with your bookmarking. And it’s long accepted knowledge that when you become popular at one site, it won’t be long before your content gets seeded to other bookmarking services. For instance, if you hit the front page of Digg, you stand a shot at getting popular on del.icio.us or reddit.

Self-promotion fuels hostility in social bookmarking users. Do it too much and you can expect a backlash. Let’s push to drop mercenary linkbaiting in favour of participation and fair use of social bookmarking services.