Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
For the past few days, many people who create new Squidoo lenses have been met with an unpleasant surprise. All the links on the lenses have been turned to nofollow, as demonstrated in the screen shot on the right. Apparently, this is a bug that popped up after Squidoo changed servers. The lenses are jammed in WIP mode, and in this mode, all links (including internal Squidoo links) are nofollow. It normally only takes the daily lensrank update to break free from this mode and, in turn, have all the links transformed to dofollow. The bug can be traced all the way back to April 9th, so it seems a bit funny that it still hasn’t been resolved.
Hopefully, this bug isn’t a preview of things to come. Most people would flip if Squidoo actually added nofollow tags. Although, Jason Calacanis might be pleased since he views Squidoo as nothing more than an outlet for spammers.
We’ll have to keep an eye on this one. It seems like a long time for a bug to still be acting up.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
Many were enraged last week when Flickr added nofollow tags to comments and picture captions. Why people would be enraged is beyond me because even my dead pet octopus could have predicted that Flickr’s sad fate was rapidly approaching. And the more that SEO’s kept blogging about how great Flickr was as an SEO tool, the faster the digits on the time bomb moved.
So the days of parsing links onto high PageRank Flickr pages are over. Or are they? No. Let’s examine why in list form. Let’s examine how you can use the remaining scraps of link juice from Flickr in your SEO campaigns.
1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits.
2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank.
3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow.
Many Flickr personal profile and group pages gain toolbar PR just by having the link spread around in-house, so it’s not that hard to make those pages accumulate PR. Google seems to be very generous in that regard. There’s a lot of PR to be passed around through Flickr apparently.
So, the glory days of Flickr SEO may be over (unless Yahoo does the improbable and flips the switch back), but Rome didn’t burn to rubble in a day, so we might as well make the most of Flickr before it completely collapses.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Social Media Optimization | 10 Comments »
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
I am a big fan of Marketing Sherpa and I have recommended them before when I posted ‘About Us’ pages can increase conversions. Well, another Marketing Sherpa study has caught my attention, describing how words increase conversions.
A few months ago I wrote an SEO tip explaining why you don’t want to use ‘click here’ for SEO, but we also know conversion rates increase when visitors are instructed to ‘click here’, ‘read more’, ‘buy now’ and so on. What is an SEO company to do?
How can search engine optimization and good user experience coexist? Both are important to the success of your website, but at times they seem at odds with each other. The solution is very simple, if not well known. Use the “nofollow” tag on the ‘click here’ links and make sure you also have a descriptive link with keyword-rich text available as well.
While the “nofollow” tag was originally set up as a spam fighter, it can be used with surgical precision to increase conversions, without hurting you SEO campaign. (Read more about the uses of nofollow) It helps because it will tell the search engines not to count or follow the link with the nofollow attribute. This means the keyword-rich link, without the nofollow, will be followed, helping the destination page’s link popularity.
How do you use nofollow?
Normal link:
<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html”>Click Here</a>
Adding the nofollow attribute:
<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html” rel=”nofollow”>Click Here</a>
Using it on your site might look like this:
Click here for the best deals on dog treats.
The HTML code would look like this:
<a href=”http://www.bestbullysticks.com” rel=”nofollow”>Click here</a> for the best deals on <a href=”http://www.bestbullysticks.com”>dog treats</a>.
Finally, SEO and Site Usability living in perfect harmony, until we start talking about graphics vs. text. 
Popularity: 7% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Mistakes, SEO Strategies, Website Conversion | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
How well does Akismet stop comment spam? The Big Oak SEO Blog has been running since October 2006 and as of today, November 28, 2007 it has protected this blog site from 10,608 spam comments
Nicely done, Akismet. I couldn’t have done it without you.
Of course it does say a lot about the pervasiveness of comment spam today and how active it still remains, sadly. But it is also a confidence builder for using the DoFollow Wordpress plugin without the fear of comment spam overrunning your site. Akismet can protect you from comment spam 99% of the time even with 10,000 spam attacks.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in Blogging, Out on a Limb, SEO Tools | 2 Comments »
Sunday, September 9th, 2007
SEO consultants always have their favorite tools and a few months ago we hired a new employee which necessitated showing what SEO tools I like to use. That led me to come up with this list of my favorite tools for SEO. I wanted to list the tools I use most frequetly rather than a list of sites with large collections of SEO tools. Maybe that will be a future post.
My SEO Toolkit:
SEOpen
I use this dozens of times everyday for client and competitor sites. Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization. Including google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar. I wouldn’t leave home without it. You will need Firefox, but that shouldn’t be a problem. I can’t imagine an SEO consultant or SEO company not recommending Firefox over every other browser.
Keyword Discovery
KeywordDiscovery compiles keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines world wide, to create a very powerful research tool. It has a free trial, but it is well worth the money to get full access.
WebPosition Gold
Web Position Gold offers a nice set of tools that we use for monitoring search results. I know it does much more than this, but we do most things manually around here. I like the way it displays the search results online for our clients to see anytime they like.
Wordpress Blogging Software
All of our clients, and this blog, run Wordpress. It is the BEST software for blogging in my opinion. The ablibity to add funtionality through plugins will always be the deciding factor, especially with so many plugins being created to support our SEO efforts.
SEO for Firefox
Want to know why Google or Yahoo! ranks pages? SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results. You can turn it off and on easily.
Google Toolbar for Firefox
Do I really need to explain this one? Google search in your browser with lots of helpful toos, especially for on-page optimization.
SearchStatus
Add-on for Firefox that displays the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyzer, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools.
Google Webmaster Central
Be sure you have signed up all the sites you manage SEO for. This is very helpful for understanding how Google sees your website.
Yahoo! Site Explorer
I mentioned Site Explorer in an earlier post, Research Your Competition with Yahoo Site Explorer but it bears repeating, this tool is indispensable in my daily routine. Fortunately, SEOpen (see above) access most of the features for Site Explorer from its menu.
If you have any tools you use, please take time to comment and let me know.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, SEO Research, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 15th, 2007
I have decided to turn off the NoFollow attribute to comment posts on my SEO blog. I believe there are enough safe guards to protect this site from spammed comments such as Akismet.
In fact, Akismet it has caught every spam comment so far. And there have been 656 spam comments in the two months since this blog was moved to its current location. Obviously, the NoFollow tag was having little or no effect on preventing spam.So, rather than penalize the people who actually write a comment worth reading, I have decided to reward any would-be commenters with a little link juice from a trusted site, providing they comment with some thought, that is.
So bring on your comments and enjoy the revolution, let links breathe free and carry weight for all!
If you wish to join the DoFollow revolution, you can download the DoFollow Wordpress plugin that will turn off the NoFollow link attribute. Thanks, Kimmo!
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in Blogging, Out on a Limb | 39 Comments »
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