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jaybong
I think the distinction is implicit.
If I say to a blogger "you can have this carton of cigarettes if you link to me" there is a clear transaction going on there. That's (ever so slightly) different to "you can have this carton of cigarettes, and if you do decide to, here's what I would prefer the link to look like"
I agree that in practice there is often very little difference between the two, but Google has to be able to draw the line somewhere. And if they come out and say the the latter is ok, then the practice would pick up which would reduce their relevency.
For a very very non tech site (think sport that mostly older people are interested in).
0.25% - 10 visits out of ~4000 - and thats probably all people from our office checking from home.
IE=83%, Firefox=12%, Safari=2%, Opera=0.26%
The best thing about Chrome is this explanation from the incognito screen:
Going incognito doesn't affect the behavior of other people, servers, or software. Be wary of:
- Websites that collect or share information about you
- Internet service providers or employers that track the pages you visit
- Malicious software that tracks your keystrokes in exchange for free smileys
- Surveillance by secret agents
- People standing behind you
That landing page is terrible. By 2012 they'll probably have it right, but I think this proves that SEM hasn't really come of age in politics just yet.
Obama could be running all sorts of ads. How about using this picture:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com//gadgets/slideshows/249/webpix//slide_249_4.jpeg and then run the following:
Palin obliterates Grizzly Bears
And will obliterate the economy too
Find out why you shouldn't trust her
sarah-palin.barrackobama.com
I think PPC has a genuine role to play in politics. For instance, although my example above was a joke, if the Obama campaign bought ads that critized Sarah Palin they'd get a pretty high CTR. Then the landing page could be full of information on things she voted for with negative connotations, drugs she took when she was young etc.
All you'd have to do is plant the seed of doubt in a voters mind about a person/issue. Especially on things that might not get a lot of coverage in the media. And if the person that clicked on the ad learnt something controvercial they'd probably tell their friends about it.
Would be interested to know specifically how you told them to structure the system, maybe with an example?
Spreading false information doesn't help beginners.
"Search engines can't follow image links" This is patently false, and saying that you used that sentence to make it easier for beginners to understand is pretty weak.
Edit: And do (so called) SEO's really need to keep telling people to submit their sites to search engines. This hasn't had any effect for years.
@Ran0h
I wasn't aware the author did not submit this to SEL. I think it's fine to write whatever you want, when it appears on a site like this though - however basic the content is - it should at least be accurate.
I have no problem with beginner material being posted on SEL and my intention was not to nit pick - just to correct blatant falsities. Most SEO (ie the stuff in your article) is very easy to explain and doesn't need to be dummed down.
Having reread your comments and the article, I still feel that when you made the point about images, you were not dumming something down, you were replacing something simple and accurate with something simple and inaccurate, and thus making it harder for a beginner to understand, especially if they have read contradictory advice.
In light of your comments about not submitting the article though, I humbly shift the blame to the SEL editors.
@emaneuelh, hows this?
Serp Value= T X $ X 1/P
Where:
T = traffic (number of searches for that keyword)
$ = profitablity of the niche
P = position i.e where you rank in the serps.
The link to the Myanmar story goes to an ask page which currently says "Article currently unavailable. Please try again later."
The newsletter sounds good, some more editorial - as opposed to community - filtered content would help.
How about selecting the top content from Sphinn (hot, what's new etc) within the SearchCap everyday. I know the purpose of Sphinn is for the community to vote what it thinks is the most important - but I follow the SearchCap because it can generally be counted on to not point me to crap, so maybe the Sphinn selections could be an extension of that.
@Halfdeck "But if we continue down this road, Sphinn will just turn into SEOnewbieville, assuming it hasn't already. There's nothing wrong with going that route except we will end up with a community of mediocre marketers. I don't believe in a product that caters to the common denominator."
I think thats the nature of social media - the knowledgeable people are in early and after time get drowned out with the less experienced. It happens to (most) forums when they get big ( i.e. DP), and digg etc.
I think it happens to most things - by the time a fashion becomes mainstream the experts at the fringe move on to something newer until that cycle repeats. There are exceptions - I think the cre8asite forum is a great place for advanced topics - but site owners still have to balance growing their sites and keeping the subject matter advanced enough to interest their original members.
As membership sites grow the value of the network grows meaning there is more incentive for late adapters to join - and those late adopters are generally less knowledgeable
Does anybody have a new link to the html or pdf? Nothing seems to be working for me.
Actually the PDF still works, it just took a long time to display. HTML's gone though.
How exactly does an invisible nofollow tag affect usability? Sure wikipedia and del.icio.us are ugly and pink to me, but not for regular users.
@Jill - "I'm in 100% agreement with Shari on this. If your site architecture isn't designed in the best manner possible to funnel internal link popularity to the appropriate places, then fix it so that it does."
The basic use of nofollow is to put it on the boilerplate pages like privacy policy etc. In my opinion it is enhances usability to have the privacy policy linked to from every page within the footer (not to mention it increases AdWords quality score).
If your opinion is such that that nofollow helps in terms of SEO but that it is an inferior replacement to proper site architecture, what would you suggest doing about this page rank leakage, or is it not a problem?
I am not saying that nofollow is the holy grail of SEO, just that small fixes like this can aggregate and benefit indexing of 3rd tier pages.
@AlanCH "Also ... forgive me if I'm visiting from the planet 'idiot' - but is download time something that is/might be added to the organic listings criteria?"
I don't see why this wouldn't be considered. It comes down to maintaining a good visitor experience (for Google's visitors) so if people clicked results that take a long time to load they might get a bit turned off.
@incredible hulk "OK I understand this conceptually, but there are millions of websites that dont do this that rank just fine in Google and other SEs"
Ranking well and implenting nofollow are not mutually exclusive. Just because websites can rank well without nofollow doesn't mean using it won't improve rankings. I think you understand this, but for a large site with a fixed amount of page rank it seems to make sense for me. Here's why:
- PR is fixed (i.e at a certain level of water in the bucket)
- And that PR is the primary factor when it comes to indexing a page.
- Therefore, for a large site with limited inlinks and many pages it might be beneficial to make sure that the unimportant pages get a limited amount of page rank. That would mean there is more left over to flow down to 2nd and 3rd level pages and make sure they get indexed.
One point you had was that it is used to block pages from search engines. This is usually not the case and can be avoided by putting nofollow on all privacy policy pages except the homepage - etc etc. A Sitemap should also work to keep the administrative pages indexed.
@TheMadHat: "but when you're looking at a site with 50k plus pages it can make a marginal difference"
Yes I am doing SEO for a 50k+ site so that was the number in my head as well :)
We actually just launched a new design (yesturday) and implemented nofollow quite aggressivly on the site, so it will be interesting to see the results when the stats update. Would have been even more interesting if we still had the supplemental label though.
Large sites generally get most of their search traffic from long tail queries, so at least for me index penetration is more important then ranking 1st and 2nd tier pages.
One of the goals of the nofollow design was that it shouldn't hurt any existing pages - just take the overflowing water from some of the higher buckets and send it further down the line to the empty buckets at the bottom.
I'll second the better search request. I have had trouble a couple of times in the past with this. Of course everyone here knows where to turn (site:) but it should be better for a SE related site.
Maybe you could add the option to frame Google results, I think this is pretty easy with custom search.
"10. Please explain whether Google posts a link to its privacy policy on the home page or search results page of www.google.com and, if not, explain why not."
Ehhh...did they check www.google.com?
("Oh, do your research, Shutton!")
Also discussed at
http://sphinn.com/story/17964
http://sphinn.com/story/17942
(Above link from controltheweb caught a braket)
@Hugo "Wish I could change the url my sphinn was pointing to"
People could link to reputable sources and then switch to their own sites if the the story became poplular. I assume that's what Pligg (The CMS) is trying to avoid.
Direct link to story (no /#33) http://wiep.net/link-value-factors/
Story: Top SEO's Competition (WTF?)
@davidogden "400/month is a small price to market yourself to Fortune 500 companies"
Maybe but it depends what that means exactly. I could send an email to the Fortune 500 companies but would that be marketing - would it even get read? Calling something marketing doesn't make it so.
The same argument could be applied to anything - including usabilty. Sure basic on page SEO should be common sense, but that doesn't mean it will become so common place as to make an industry obsolete.
Usabilty - if I have this right - is all about common sense. But that fact won't keep the lazy web designers from ignoring it.
Everett, I think basic SEO is the stuff that generates the best, fastest and easiest results. Things like knowing what people will search for, title tags, and proper internal linking structure.
Even if you know a lot about SEO, these sort of things will probably get you 70% of the results an entire SEO project will see.
Nielsen's comment "Web sites need SEO consultants to save themselves from their own stupidities" is pretty accurate; I just think he is wrong in assuming that web developers will get significantly smarter within the next few years.
As Seth would say: "It's not their job"
From Blogoscoped: With Google tracking how often a link is shared and viewed, it will be interesting to see whether this data is used by their ranking algorithms, especially since users are asked to tag their shared items.
I would expect to see greater influence of social networks on the Google algorithm as people share already popular content.
Story: Blog Marketing & Pay Per Post: They're Not The Same