Updated: May 25, 2012 I see a lot of outdated information about the rel nofollow tag. Particularly a lot of advice to use it in page rank sculpting. That might have been useful at one point, but it hasn’t been for over a year now.
What is the nofollow tag?
The nofollow tag is a tag you can add to a href link to tell Google not to pass page rank to the link. It is typically used for comments on a blog (to discourage comment spam) and for sponsored links. By adding this tag to your href HTML code you are telling Google, I’m not sure I trust this site and I don’t want to pass my link juice over to it.
One of the things you often need to do as a SEO is look at the backlink profile of websites. This can be useful to see how your competitors have acquired backlinks – which, as we all know, quality backlinks are important for your website to rank well. Yahoo search explorer’s linkdomain command has been a way to do this in the past, but it has grown unreliable and misleading. Alternatives are available, for example SEOMoz provides opensiteexplorer.org and there is also Majestic SEO, but you need a paid account to get the full benefits.
So I was excited to hear Matt Cutts mention on a recent video, that although Google had historically limited the number of backlinks the link: returned due to storage issues that now it was possible to get the full set of backlinks.
I’ve seen several “top blog directories to submit your blog to” articles, however these lists are often light on details or out of date. Here are 16 blog directories that I went to take a look at. Like regular web directories, some blog directories will only list you for a fee, and yet still more request a reciprocal link before they will list you. Some are rather sneaky about it, you don’t figure out you have to reciprocate or pay until you are a step or two into the submission process.
That being said, just like web directories, it might be worth paying for a listing in some of these blog directories, however that analysis (choosing which one to pay for) is for another day.
For some of these you should be prepared to create an account and choose a category that your blog belongs to. Some ask for a full profile. Some have validation/ownership verification processes. It WILL take more time than you expect. Many of these will have a human review the submission before publishing it. That’s ok, in fact it is good, as google looks more favorably on directories that have editorial review.
WordPress is an extremely flexible platform. One aspect of it’s flexibility is that it provides many different sorts of aggregate pages, you can choose to show your posts chronologically, grouped by your tags and/or grouped by category. And of course the home page shows a list of your posts unless you have chosen to show a static page instead. However having all these different ways to show the same content can be seen as duplicate content by the search engines.
Unfortunately duplicate content in wordpress is a rather complex topic, but in this post I want to focus on just one aspect that has a relatively straightforward solution to it. But first let’s understand the problem better. When I talk about duplicate content, I am talking about content that is the same across multiple pages of your site. This is beyond having duplicate pages. Google and the other search engines essentially don’t want to see the same block of content on multiple page. Which is precisely what you have when you have category, tag, home and archive pages showing your posts in their entirety.
When we first build a website, the thought of actually telling Google and the other search engines to not spider a given web page seems counter-intuitive, why would anyone want Google to not spider their website? (Well except when you are Rue La La).
Here’s one reason. A more sophisticated website might have a login page or registration page. Often these pages shouldn’t be indexed as they don’t add value for ranking for keywords. Compounding the issue, in one case I looked at, the registration page was manifesting as many registration pages, because the site was tacking on a return url in the parameter (so that after the registration the user would be returned to the calling page), creating duplicate content.
If you have many URLs that all point to the same page, that is known as duplicate content (this is different than duplicate content across many websites … and worse) and definitely to be avoided. Each site gets limited link juice and a limited spider crawl budget, you don’t want to waste either on yet another version of a page the spider has seen before.
So to tell the spiders you don’t want a page to be indexed, you put the no index meta tag into the HTML source code (between the open and closing <HEAD> tags) for that page.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>
Why the follow? So that the link juice from external incoming links and internal links can pass through to the links on the page you are noindexing. Otherwise you are creating a dead end that stops the link juice from passing through. The registration page might not be important, but it might have links to articles that are.
I wanted to explicitly point this out, because if you search on “meta tag no index” you will find lots of examples of “no index, no follow”. Lindsay Wassell makes a compelling case for the right use of this tag in her seomoz.org article and explains why using robots.txt instead is not a viable alternative.
Forget those “search engine submission” services (what do they do anyway?) Here’s how to notify Yahoo and Google about your site and, even better, give them a roadmap to all your pages. I recently had to do this for three websites, so I captured the process of submitting a sitemap for both Google using Google Webmasters Tools and Yahoo using Site Explorer.
I’m assuming you have already built a XML sitemap of your site. If you haven’t and you have a wordpress site, see my 4 essential plugins post, if you have some other type of site, check into gsitecrawler..
Before you can submit your sitemap to Yahoo and Google, you have to “verify” that you own the site. You’ll need an account (ie. a gmail account for Google Webmaster Tools) and a way to modify / create files on your site. Note that there is multiple ways to verify your site (4 for google / 2 for yahoo), so I am just going to cover the uploading HTML file for verification method.
Step 1: Add Your Site Create an Account or Login into each with your Google/Yahoo accounts:
For both the first part of adding a site is straightforward and intuitive. For Yahoo it is under “My Sites”.
Adding Website in Google Webmaster Tools
Step 2: Download / Upload the verification file
Step 2 is more complex. When you add your site you will be prompted to go through a validation process. There will be several steps to this:
Google
Google Verification
Just follow the steps as outlined:
First download the file – it will be a long filename that starts with “google”
Then upload to your web server’s root directory using a FTP program. Note that you will need to know your hosting account details (which is likely not the same as your wordpress login details)
Check that the file is there by clicking on the link, you should see something like “google verification” in your browser
Now click on the verify button
For Yahoo the process is very similar:
Download
Upload
Confirm link in browser
Click Authenticate
Yahoo SiteExplorer Authentication
Note that with yahoo the filename starts with “y_key”. With yahoo I had failures with the authenticate step. It might have been because my blog has a redirect in .htaccess to redirect traffic to my blog directory (although I added the files to both the root and the /blog directory) . It might have been because I first added the site as webenso.com rather than www.webenso.com. In any case, persistence was the key, I deleted the site, readded the site as www.webenso.com and tried the authentication twice, the second time it seemed to go through. Note that with yahoo, it sometimes just sends you back to the initial rendering of the authentication page, without telling what happened.
Step 4: Add your sitemap
To add your sitemap you will need to know it’s filename. Google XML Sitemaps plugin usually defaults to calling your sitemap: sitemap.xml.
In Webmaster tools, the sitemap options are on the lower right hand side for your site. SiteExplorer calls sitemaps “feeds”.
Click on Site Explorer Feeds Menu Item to add Sitemap
A note about Bing:
Even though Bing and Yahoo are merging due to the Microsoft / Yahoo search engine deal, it might not be a bad idea to submit your sitemap to Bing, fortunately it’s easy:
Substitute your Sitemap URL into the string below (eg. https://webenso.com/sitemap.xml) and run it in your browser URL box.
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=put URL of your sitemap here
You’ll get a “Thanks for submitting your sitemap.” message in your browser window.
Updated: May 25, 2012
