Oh sweet "nofollow!" I use you on my blog to keep my link juice from spilling out onto the shady, dark world of the Internet underbellies. I even use you to sculpt my sites, hoping to wrangle PageRank and content into my own little silo of SERP love. Yet you are fickle and have proven to be a lying, cheating bastard.
You might be asking, "why all the prose?" And by prose, I know you mean really crappy melodrama. It's because Google keeps changing the rules, but keeps their public message the same. I find this both irritating and also brilliant. Such is the case with the infamous rel="nofollow" attribute.
The nofollow attribute is supposed to behave. It's supposed to not let search engines follow its links. It's supposed to do what we've been told by Google what it's supposed to do. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that. Instead, relevance and juice still seems to get past it. How do I know this, because we've experimented with it — experiments I'm unwilling to share to protect the identity of the not-so-innocent.
The biggest place that we've seen the offense is with blog comments. We've recently found that the anchor text and links that are supposed to be nofollow'd by Google are doing quite well. In fact, we've done (loose) experiments with unique anchor text — using the anchor text only on blog comments that were nofollowed — and have found them ranking #1 and #2 on Google. Let me repeat, we never built any other links with anchor text remotely close to the anchor text we used on those comments, yet we got results from it as if it had been dofollow.
We've only seen this recently in the past few months, which leads me to believe that Google is fiddling with their algorithm and changing the rules with nofollow once again. But like the government, we won't find out about it until it doesn't even matter anymore.
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Word Visualization on Search Marketing Blogs
On Wednesday we blogged about the Raven word cloud ran through Wordle. If you haven't ran your blog or site through Wordle, I highly recommend it. The Wordle word cloud tool gives you a daily snapshot of your front page and outputs an image with the most prominent words in large text. If you're concerned that you may not be on topic, the Wordle tool will give you an immediate answer.
Yahoo! Exposes Part of Google Search Deal Terms in SEC Document
A report from both Reuters and CNET contains information concerning the details of Yahoo!'s paid search deal with Google. Search Engine Land goes into a great amount of detail about the deal and discusses the impact that the agreement will have on the rest of the search industry. Amongst other issues, the article addresses the possibility that Google ads will have even greater reach and that Yahoo! will have a lot more opportunities to serve ads against queries (because of Google's much larger volume of ads).
Google Flips the Switch On Adsense
After a testing period that ran for more than two months, Google has finally approved of including AdSense in feeds. Formerly FeedBurner ads, the acquired company has moved lock, stock, and barrel of its advertising program over to Google's system. This means that any AdSense advertiser can tap into the Feedburner network.
Raven Recap
Quite often, the way to find out if something is fraudulent is to compare it with the real deal - something authentic. Now, this is not to say that unfriendly URLs are fraudulent in any way; it's just that they're untidy, dirty and definitely not liked by search engines. So before we begin discussing the ramifications of using one or the other, let's take a look at just what they look like side by side:
A Search Engine Friendly URL:
http://www.mydomain.com/articles/my-content-title-is-here
An Unfriendly URL:
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id+3272<emid=43
Some of the visible differences of the URL structure are immediate - the length and type of characters used are vastly different. However, before we delve deeper into the nuances of the two, it's important to note that the unfriendly URL is not technically incorrect per se; it just falls well below the modern day coding standards and sufficient technical capabilities needed to maximize its potential.
What a URL Should Contain
In essence, a search-engine-friendly URL should clearly include the following three items:
- The Domain Name
- Content Category
- Article Title
By clearly specifying the domain name, the content category and the article title, the user knows which site he's at, which category he's reading, and the name of the title. So in other words, the URL actually makes sense and means something. In comparison to an unfriendly URL which contains virtually no useful elements to a user or a search engine bot, the friendly URL encompasses all the requirements necessary to help achieve good rankings in the SERPs.
Unfriendly URLs
As you can see from our example above, unfriendly URLs are difficult to type, do not promote usability, and can potentially pose a security risk. In a content management system (CMS) environment, unfriendly URLs are commonplace. While the CMS may be robust and efficient, in the creative process, no forethought may have been given to the URL.
Search engine bots are finicky (especially Google) - any whiff of anything that remotely smells like a dodgy query string, and they will take their presence elsewhere.
Optimizing Your URL
There are certain elements that can be changed in an unfriendly URL for various reasons. An ampersand, for example (otherwise known as an '&') can be changed to '&'. The reason for doing this is because a common error can occur. The '&' is assumed to begin a reference to an entity and browsers can recover from this kind of error but mistakes do happen in certain cases.
Let's say our URL contained the following query string:
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?option=com_content=2©=3taskview&id+3272<emid=43
For the part of the URL that is in bold, many browsers convert '©=3' to '©=3' and correctly so. Subsequently, in conversion, the link would then fail.
SEO Friendly URL Recommendations
- Try and keep the URL short
- Avoid using query strings
- Use all lowercase letters - even though domain names are not case sensitive, the rest of the URL is. There was recently some discussion at the Webmaster World forums about using Pascal Casing. While there might be some advantages to using Pascal Casing, I would err on the side of caution and consistency and keep all of your URLs lowercase.
- Use hyphens instead of underscores. it is still considered best practice to use hyphens instead of underscores because most search engines will not seperate
- Keep the URL structure logical
- Include keywords in the domain name
It is no fluke that when googling 'SEO friendly URLs' that a Sitepoint article is in first place. The URL is probably the tidiest in the top 10 SERP listings - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-friendly-urls. By itself, using tidy URLs may not have such a dramatic impact as link building or optimized title tags, but it can make a difference between a number one listing and a listing below the fold. So if you haven't thought about implementing friendly URLs on your website or blog, I'd say there's no bigger incentive than a number one spot in the SERPs.
The Online Marketing Blog is a regular internet haunt of mine because of the consistent quality posting of search related content. Often one of the issues directed at search related content, and in particular search related blogs or sites, is that the content is regurgitated. So, to put that to the test, Lee Odden ran the top search marketing blogs through a word cloud creator Wordle.
The results are stunning, in more ways than one. The word visualization is presented really well by Wordle, but the insight it gives you into the content on a particular blog makes the tool extremely useful. However, note that the results are a single day snapshot of the homepage, not the entire site.
Our word cloud is below.
Take a moment to run Wordle on your own site and let us know what your main words are in the comments.
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