Gabriel Harper's Blog

The nofollow tag (as it’s commonly referred to), is an HTML attribute proposed by Matt Cutts of Google and Jason Shellen of Blogger.com in 2005. It is a recommendation on behalf of search engines to add a special identifier to links that shouldn’t be counted towards search results. For instance, unmoderated blog comments might be a candidate for nofollow attribute.

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Google has a history of commemorating holidays and historic events by showing a different logo for the day, and this is the best yet! Today is Samuel Morse’s birthday (you know, Morse code?), and they spelled out Google in the famous dash-dot character encoding.

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I just compared Google referrals to PageRank on 37 different Websites, and here are the results. The numbers are pretty amazing. If PageRank does mean anything, it certainly doesn’t mean good search performance…

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Google Toolbar has finally outgrown it’s usefulness. After years of using the Firefox add-on, I permanently removed it from all my computers.  The PageRank display was my only reason for using the toolbar. Now PageRank isn’t very useful, the toolbar slows down browsing, and I even saved a meager 4.7MB of memory.

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Whatever Google is up to with PageRank lately, it’s quickly losing my interest. PageRank was never meant to be a reliable measure of search engine performance, but it was usually “in the neighborhood”. After the last few PageRank updates, I’ve found myself relying almost completely on other tools due to the extreme gaps I continue to observe.

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Those tycoons over at vBSEO released a free Google Analytics widget for vBulletin users codenamed LiveStats. This free widget displays a JavaScript widget with comprehensive Website statistics from Google Analytics. I don’t plan on publishing all my traffic statistics, but they can be kept private and LiveStats gets definite kudos for using sparklines!

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Sometimes the PageRank toolbar blacks out and it appears to be one of those times. For the last 24 hours or so it’s been reporting “No PageRank information available” for most top-level domains. Many subpages are still showing PR on the toolbar, and a lot of sites seem unaffected.

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Google’s Webmaster Guidelines no longer suggests having relevant sites link to yours. They also removed their suggestion of submitting your site to relevant directories. This was brought up in Google Groups recently, and subsequently on the big Webmaster forums Digital-Point and Sitepoint. However based on the logic of these threads, which get pretty heated over Google vs. directories, Google is also suggesting that we don’t have relevant sites link to us!

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Google is against paid links.  They have made this clear by asking Webmasters to report sites that sell links, repeateadly blogging about how paid links are bad, and by evidently selecting sites to torture in their search algorithm for participating in link sales. Obviously a lot of people are upset about this – publishers want to sell advertising on their site as they see fit, and not hire programmers to understand things like “nofollow”. Search engine marketers don’t want to be subjected to Google’s guessing games. Who will be next for Google to torture?

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Many years ago I didn’t know what a search engine friendly URL was. Now I practice human readable “search engine friendly URLs” whenever possible. When I stumbled upon the concept and started moving away from dynamic URLs to friendly, keyword rich URLs I noticed a direct and immediate positive impact on how much I was crawled and how well I was ranked in Google. Is that still the case? I still use friendly URLs whenever I can, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of agreement on the subject.

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Google has been making some serious steps toward global domination lately, and one such step is Google Health: The Internet’s one-stop-shop for centralizing health information about the public. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of going digital, but Google worries me sometimes.

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On this day in 1960, just 48 short years ago, Theodore Maiman of Hughes Research Laboratories demonstrated the first working laser. Just what would our world be without lasers anyway? A very unlasery place I imagine. Google celebrates this day with a homepage dedicated to lasers and a creative Google logo composed entirely of lasers!

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Google’s homepage is looking fairly normal lately with the classic logo, but Google is now displaying a short message about Doodle 4 Google which reads “Over 16,000 children drew doodles for Google’s homepage. Vote for the one that will appear here.” So now it’s our turn to decide what shows up on Google’s homepage! Not only that but make some kid’s day (erm… week? month? life?) by getting their sketch displayed on Google.com.

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Ready to spice up your Google homepage with some great art? Today we are greeted with Google’s latest homepage promoting iGoogle Artist Themes. Today’s Google logo sports art work by Jeff Koons as an example of the possibilities using iGoogle Artist Themes. Below the logo reads “What happens when great art mixes with your homepage?” iGoogle Artist Themes. And where would be without a nice screenshot to show off the new iGoogle Artist homepage?

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Even if you don’t celebrate Earth Day, Google does. And you’re sure to be enticed by a completely free screenshot of them doing it! We already celebrated Earth Hour with Google, so let’s move on to bigger and better things with Earth Day!

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Google has a tradition of doing zany things to their logo and Web site for holidays and other important events. Today Google greets us with a shockingly dark page and states “We’ve turned the lights out. Now it’s your turn…”. Google provides a little more detail, going on to say this is “… a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour“.

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Every professional webmaster and site owner needs to maximize traffic to their web site. Affiliate programs, link exchanges, search submission programs, and pay-per-click services offer many ways to promote yourself, but webmasters around the world still pour countless hours into Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google is the biggest target and it is no surprise, with over 55 billion searches made on their site in 2003.

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