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…

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!

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.

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!

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page.

When you do a search in Google (for example), a page of (usually 10) results is displayed to you. These results are what the search engine thinks are most relevant to your query. Results on subsequent pages may have relevance, but that becomes increasingly unlikely the further back you go.

The results displayed by any search engine are based on a number of factors. The most important is whether the content of the web page matches the words in the search query.

Other factors may include how authoritative the website is, the age of the website and how many links point to the site. Inbound links are considered a ‘vote’ for your site, which is why so many people place emphasis on link building for SEO.

Why Do I Want To Be On The First Results Page?

You want people to visit your website.

It’s a fact that the majority of searchers will find what they’re looking for on the first page of results. Obviously, the prime position is at the top of the page, among the first three results.

Search engines are a vital source of traffic for your website. If you show up in first position on page one of the results, people are much more likely to click through to your site than someone whose site appears on the tenth page of results.

So, your position in the Search Engine Results Pages is critical to the exposure and eventual success of your website.

How Do You Search?

I want you to think about how you search for information on the Internet.

How many pages of results will you wade through to find the right information? How often do the first results you find meet your needs? Do you refine your query to get better results?

If you own or run a website, you’ll see the importance of getting on that first page of results for whatever keywords drive visitors to your site. In a future guide, I’ll be looking at how you can track what search phrases people are using to find your site and how to extend content on your site.

What nofollow Does

nofollow is an attribute that can be added to links on a web page. While not directly beneficial to users, it tells search engines that the link is untrusted. As a result, search engines avoid the link.

nofollow was originally intended to prevent link spamming on community websites such as blogs and forums. Wikipedia adopted nofollow a while back because it was so easy to drop spammy links into their pages.

Google uses the number of links back to a website and the authority of the linking site as a means for calculating the importance of a web page. By using nofollow, you tell the search engine to exclude the link from that calculation – so the site gets no benefit from the link.

Now, they have decided to remove the nofollow code from any links that point to Wikia and a few other approved blogs.

Why Should You Care?

You might not think that this is a problem on the face of it, but Wikipedia has grown into a massive authority site based on the number of links back to it from other sites. Therefore, any sites that Wikipedia links to (without using nofollow) will have an immediate advantage in the search engines.

They describe this as editorial approval of links to trusted sites, but there are any number of legitimate articles from legitimate sites that could be added to a Wikipedia page. Why should they be unfairly hobbled? Because Wikimedia don’t have the resources to police every link added to Wikimedia.

I suggest that Wikipedia should adopt either a blanket application of nofollow or remove it altogether. I agree with Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal, who said:

I do not think that selective power linking to projects which make your company money is the answer and do not see much of a difference between Wikipedia’s Wikia linking practice and sites selling editorial links (links placed within editorial content) to the highest bidder.

Put simply, Wikipedia are using their PageRank strength to boost another for-profit company. They are giving their for-profit website special treatment at the expense of other quality resources.

Check out Michael Gray’s post about the dominance of Wikipedia in the search engine listings to see why this should be of concern to webmasters. As a webmaster and SEO, I’m worried that Wikipedia’s dominance even for simple common or garden keywords may make it harder for clients (or myself) to get search engine exposure with new websites. I think you should too.

Well, a few weeks ago we formally launched two new blogs under the Unreality banner – Unreality Music (my baby) and Unreality Primetime (Lisa’s baby). Comparing our strategies last night, we realised we were taking extremely different approaches.

The Challenge

Over the course of the next twelve months, we will be battling each other to see who can build the most successful blog. We’ll measure success on a number of criteria, which I’ll reveal in a forthcoming post.

The Strategy

Lisa’s approach is primarily about content-building. She’ll watch the latest TV news and blog about it rapid-fire. I’ve never seen someone compile content so efficiently. Better still, she’s now got contacts in TV publicity, so she gets a lot of the inside scoop on shows. I joked with her at the weekend that there’s no point reading the TV guide anymore, because she’s usually two days ahead.

My approach to writing is much more methodical. I’ll be writing about music, so I research the band in advance. I’m a slower writer by nature anyway. On the music blog, I’ll be working on a link building strategy and possibly trying to use social media to gain backlinks to the blog, which Lisa isn’t too worried about – she built Unreality TV up mostly on organic SEO!

The Outcome

The Blog Battle will end on 1 May 2008. Along the way, we’ll compare readership, traffic stats and how our strategies are working. Hopefully we’ll have two fairly successful blogs by the end of the year. Posts in this series will be tagged Blog Battle.

More importantly, we’ll be able to tell you which approach works best for a blog – pure content building and organic SEO, or less content but more focused on link building and social media promotion.

The goal here is to establish two top quality blogs using different methods and see how they perform over time. Although monetisation will be involved, the main motivation is to have fun building two great sites.

Anyway, we hope that other bloggers out there will follow our experiment and chip in with their thoughts and advice along the way. May the best (music) blog win!

I got the idea to do this after installing the Head META Description plugin for WordPress and realising that I wasn’t automatically doing this in my ASP.NET applications.

Why META Description Is Important

Although Search Engines don’t place as much weight on META tags these days, the Description tag in particular is useful, because it helps to control what a search engine displays in its results.

If you don’t specify text to use, the search engine will create the description line itself. It may come out as unreadable garbage. However, if you do specify a description tag, you’ll get a coherent sentence that can act as teaser content in the search engines.

How To Generate META Description In ASP.NET

OK, let’s roll up our sleeves and get started. The first assumption I’m making is that you’re storing your content in a database of some description and that you have a large text field that stores the content of each page.

Processing The String

Below I’ve shown the function which we’ll use. Firstly it strips any HTML from the string using another function, then we split the string into an array which allows us to easily select the first 20 words with the For i = 0 To intLimit loop.

If the string ends with an incomplete sentence, we add an elipsis “…” to the end of the string to signify that there’s more to read. Finally, we return the formatted Description text.

Public Shared Function extractMeta(ByVal docToParse As String) As String
	docToParse = vbStripTags(docToParse)
	Dim oArray As Array = Split(docToParse, " ")
	Dim strOutput As String = ""
	Dim intLimit As Integer = 20, i As Integer
	For i = 0 To intLimit
		strOutput &= oArray(i) & " "
	Next
	If UBound(oArray) - 1 > intLimit Then
		strOutput &= "..."
	End If
	Return strOutput
End Function

Using HTMLMETA to Insert META Description

I set the META Description at the point where I’m building the page from the database. In a nutshell though, the following code will add the Description to your page (I’m using a SqlDataReader object to read the various database fields):

Dim metaDescription As New HtmlMeta
metaDescription.Name = "description"
metaDescription.Content = extractMeta(oReader("news_text"))
Page.Header.Controls.Add(metaDescription)

You’ll probably need to do a little bit of jiggery-pokery with this to get it right, but in general it works well.

Optimising Your Descriptions

When you’re writing for the web, you need to create compelling content for your readers. Now that your descriptions are optimised, you should try to make the lead sentence of each article more compelling.

The two areas to focus on are using relevant keywords within those first 20 or so words, and writing a sentence that will make people want to read more.

Basically, you’re catering to the search engines with the keywords and your human audience with an interesting introduction. The keywords will hopefully improve your ranking, while a leading sentence will hopefully attract more searchers to click through to your site.

That’s the goal anyway! Good luck with your new META tags!

Here’s the truth about getting your site listed on Google: all you need is another site to link back to you.

How Google Works

Google is a crawler-based search engine. Sounds creepy, but what this means is that Google’s technology ‘reads’ the web by following links on web pages. It then makes an index of the information it finds and uses that index to return results whenever you do a Google search.

In reality, if another public website links to you, like a trade directory or a business partner, then Google will become aware of your website through that link. Simple as that.

I think that submitting your site to Google is a bit of a placebo. Instead, concentrate on getting quality links to your site. This has more long-term effectiveness as Google counts every link to your site as a vote of quality, and the link itself will provide visitors with another way to find your site.

We’ve used it recently with our website and had good coverage with local press and media. In fact, word has it that the BBC spotted Lisa on a rival channel and tried frantically to get in touch, even ringing people with the same surname in Crumlin! We must’ve forgotten to send them the press release!

Aaron Shear, who I’ve been reading for the last few weeks has some useful pointers if you’re considering press releases as a marketing strategy for your blog.

Firstly, Aaron recommends using an internet wire service, presumably PR Leap or PR Web. This is your best bet anyway, although we’re trying to amass a database of relevant journalists and publications that we can contact directly also.

Another important point is to include hyperlinks in the document to specific pages in your site. You should also target the link text for appropriate keywords, because if your release is used, you will receive very well targetted backlinks!

Probably the strongest suggestion Aaron puts forward is to publish press releases on your website. This is an approach I hadn’t considered before, but it would be useful to have an archive of press releases available for journalists to look back at prior developments.

With our TV blog, I try to write a thought-provoking piece on a topical show (say the recent race controversy in Celebrity Big Brother) or perhaps start a campaign to support a particular contestant. I’ll then create a press release linking to that piece and stating our opinions.

The most important thing – if you’re going to use press releases frequently – is to document the process: publishing a newsworthy piece (in my case), writing an interesting press release and then releasing it. You’ll be sending to targetted people as well as general services like PR Leap, so get a spreadsheet or database of contacts and use this every time. Add to it as other sources come up.

By documenting the process, you’ll be able to carry out a press release campaign with military precision every time.