NoFollow and PageRank Sculpting Roundup: Changes and Implications
Matt Cutts has decided to reveal a little more about Google’s internal changes that brought upon debate regarding the use of the NoFollow tag and PageRank Sculpting. While there has been quite a bit of discussion, I wanted to take a moment to wrap up what has happened and what the implications of these are for white and black-hat techniques. What Has Changed Think of your webpage as a water tower and links as pipes from that water tower to other smaller water towers. Historically, a “nofollow” tag was like capping the one of the pipes so that no water would flow to the terminating water tower. Google has changed this, though. Instead of capping the pipe, they merely divert it into the abyss. The link still impacts your page’s ability to...
Simple PageRank User Script
This is a RePost after we lost some stories from our db. As an avid user of the Opera browser, one of my long time difficulties has been the lack of a Google Toolbar. Frankly, the only thing I am interested in on that toolbar is to see the TBPR (toolbar PR). So, without further adieu, here is a simple UserScript for seeing the PageRank. This will drop a little image in the upper left of each page you visit with the PageRank. When you mouse over the image, it disappears so you can get to any of the navigation that might be blocked by the image. // ==UserScript== // @name PR for Opera // @description Shows PageRank for Opera in Right Hand Corner. Disappears when you mouse over it. // ==/UserScript== if(parent.frames.length == 0) { var imgURL =...
PageRank Sculpting is Dead, Long Live PageRank Sculpting
Update: This is a RePost after our Database Lost Some Recent Posts. Our suspicions have been verified. PageRank Sculpting still works, just not with nofollow. This is in accordance with the original intent of nofollow, which was to tag untrustworthy links. The links you create and control on your own site to pages you create yourself are inherently trustworthy. The search marketing world is all abuzz with the latest from Matt Cutts that PageRank sculpting no longer works via the SMX Advanced conference. What Has Changed I think what is actually occurring is a far more simple, straightforward and, frankly, obvious update on behalf of the Google search team. This is the question I immediately asked myself upon hearing the news: why should the NUMBER of internal...
Silk Icon Set CSS: Using CSS Clipping and Optimized Silk Icon Image
First off, I have to start by saying I absolutely love FamFamFam.com’s free “Silk” icon set. It is unequivocally the most valuable set of free images I have ever used and I recommend if you use it you donate accordingly. With 1000 icons, each roughly 1KB in size, it is understandable how eventually it would get cumbersome for a web application interface using 20 to 30 of these icons at a time to continue to try to handle each of these images individually. Moreover, as often as these icons are used across the web, it made sense to me that the popular image-clipping CSS method might be valuable not just for my own web application development but others as well. What is the CSS Clipping Method and Why While I’m not the best at explaining...
The New Canonical Link Tag: What to do…
First off, kudos to the search engines for working together to come up with a reasonable standard for solving what had previously been an intractable issue. I will restrain myself from saying “it’s about damn time”, or maybe I just didn’t, but regardless this is a fantastic new tool that far more webmasters can implement. Here are some initial thoughts. What it really changes…The burden has shifted from knowing all the false URLs (in order to create URL rewrites to address them) to simply knowing the correct URLs. Who it really helps….The New Canonical Link Tag is most useful to webmasters and site-authors who do not have access to redirecting languages. Since 301 redirects are initiated server-side, users of CMS or hosted-app...
PageRank vs. MozRank
Please Note: LinkScape and MozRank have been updated since this publishing. The graphs and data below are no longer accurate, albeit still interesting IMHO.With the announcing and opening of the fantastic SEOMoz MozRank API for Linkscape, I thought it would be worth taking a bit of time to compare MozRank to PageRank using existing and fresh PageRank data. Essentially, we wanted to determine if there were any patterns of dispersion between the MozRank and PageRank for random pages across the internet. Using the API, we were able to collect data on 1000 various pages. We selected only pages above PR0 to discourage the likelihood of identifying pages with no MozRank data. We also, as expected, have a skew in the representation of higher PR data, as they are just...
Rand’s Questions Get More Difficult
A year or two back, Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz posted a list of questions he still had not answered in the world of SEO. As a matter of sheer luck, we had just finished up a bit of experimentation that answered quite a few of them. Well, Rand is at it again with 8 more questions, this time with far more difficult questions to answer – many of which may be unknowable without a leak from Google. However, one question in particular, #8, Will Anchor Text Value Pass Through Terribly Low Quality Links?. It is fairly understood that high quality links will boost the PageRank variable in the ranking equation, and low quality links will not. It is also understood that high quality links with good anchor text will boost the Relevancy variable in the ranking...
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