Internet Business Blog

Ever since its inception in January 2005, the (now infamous) nofollow attribute has caused quite a stir amongst webmasters. When applied to an outbound link, it’s a method of restricting the benefit that link provides to the destination website.

At a very basic level, direct hyperlinks usually offer two types of benefit to the website being linked to:

1. As a recommendation or vote in the eyes of a search engine thereby boosting the apparent popularity of the website being linked to.
2. As a source of visitor traffic as people click through from the linking website.

Developed to tackle the growing problem of people deliberately abusing the popularity benefit by placing junk comments with links on other peoples blogs, the big three search engines (Google, MSN, and Yahoo!) quickly agreed to support the nofollow attribute to a degree.

Wikipedia has a write-up on how it’s thought the different search engines respond to the nofollow attribute. Whether or not it’s an accurate representation of the truth is anyone’s guess.

The nofollow attribute isn’t unique to blogs, however, and webmasters can no longer turn a blind eye or plead ignorance to what websites they’re linking to as these search engines have placed the responsibility for using the nofollow attribute squarely with them and it’s not difficult to see why. Since it’s the webmasters who control the websites, they also control the links too.

As well as a means of controlling the dispersion of search ranking boosting benefit to external websites, Google have also indicated that it can be used for internal links. From SEOmoz,

Rand Fishkin: Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love?

Matt Cutts: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages

So what does the nofollow attribute mean to you?

Well, if you link to a website from your own website then you’re expected to use the nofollow attribute such that paid links are clearly identified as such to search engines who can then treat them according to their own policies. Practically, that means changing your links from this,

<a href="http://www.example.com/">Visit My Website</a>

to

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Visit My Website</a>

So, for example, if you sell text links on your website then you are expected to apply the nofollow attribute to any links sold. The consequences of not doing so and being found out can mean some form of penalty being applied e.g. black flagging your website so that no links provide any search engine benefit. That’s not to say that this is actually what happens, but you should be aware that it’s possible.

If you’re using website software such as WordPress then you may already be using the nofollow attribute without realising as some applications come pre-programmed to apply it to certain links. WordPress, for example, applies the nofollow attribute to all links in comments.

If you’re a webmaster who purchases links for their search engine benefit then you should be aware that some link sellers will follow the nofollow guidelines set by the search engines so always consider the traffic benefit that a link can provide.

There are plenty of people who think that the likes of Google are asking for too much control of how websites are run and have taken steps to defy such restriction, for example, by installing the Dofollow plugin for their WordPress blog.

Do you think nofollow affects you? Do search engines have the right to set such guidelines for webmasters? Do they have the right to issue penalties if their guidelines aren’t adhered to?

Technorati Tags: nofollow, dofollow, Google, MSN, Yahoo

The folks at Interspire are almost ready to release their long awaited shopping cart software, StoreSuite (I’ve certainly been waiting for a long time).

If you’ve never come across Interspire or any of their products before then it’s worth you taking a good long look because they’ve got a lot of excellent products to offer ranging from newsletter management software to website builders and complete content management systems.

What helps to make Interspire software different from the rest is that as well as scoring highly on the usability front (for both users and admins), their software is private label. This means you can remove their branding and replace it with your own. This is great for website developers wanting to resell mature, well-supported, ready-made solutions as their own. Being template-based means that you can customise the front-ends to suit your or your clients needs without having to mess around with embedded code.

Their software is generally licensed on a single-domain basis, but after purchasing any of their full licences, you’re automatically eligible to receive a discount on subsequent licences.

Anyway, back to StoreSuite…

The feature list already boasts such functionality as:

• Drag and drop design mode – using AJAX to let you rearrange panels on your store website. This is something I’ve yet to see featured on another store system. Watch the video demo to see how this works.
• Suggested products (as seen on Amazon) – when a product is added to the shopper’s cart, the system automatically suggests other products they might be interested in.
• SEO-friendly store pages with individual page meta data to improve those search engine results listings.
• Dynamic promotions displayed throughout the store.
• Product reviews – past customer reviews, like testimonials, really help to sell a product and allow your customers to help improve your sales to potential customers.
• Product comparison – so your customers can choose the most suitable products for their needs.

As someone who has spent hundreds of dollars on Interspire products and also used carts such as X-Cart and OSCommerce before, the arrival of StoreSuite can’t happen quickly enough.

Technorati Tags: Shopping cart, E-Commerce, StoreSuite, Interspire

It’s great how people keep coming up with clever domain names for their Web2.0 websites. In this day, when the vast majority of single-word domain names have already been registered, it takes a little imagination to come up with something brandable, catchy and importantly, short!

I googled and tried a few domain name generators, but none of them delivered anything like the format I wanted.

To address this, for a bit of fun, I put together my own Web 2.0 Domain Name Generator.

Give it a try and let me know if you come up with anything great!

Technorati Tags: Web2.0, domain names

Today, I received an email newsletter from Text Link Ads, part of which read,

If you are ready for an ad that can drive traffic and raise your natural search engine rankings head on over to TLA now

If I ran a search engine and I was aiming to deliver the most relevant results to my users then I’d also be concerned about people trying to take advantage of the careful developed ranking algorithms I’d put in place.

Whilst some websites using paid links might deserve a rankings boost i.e. they’re relevant for user search terms, but perhaps don’t yet have enough back-links to lift them into the limelight of the first three pages, paid links allow any website with a marketing budget to get those improvements regardless of whether or not they’re deserved.

Back-links are a handy natural voting system. Using back-links as votes may not be the perfect voting system, but it’s very effective. Is paying for votes any more ethical on the Internet than it is in the real world?

Technorati Tags: Paid links, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, TLA

Recently, I’ve come across a number of truly outstanding pieces of software and I just wanted to give their creators their due credit for helping to make my life easier.

A.F.5

A.F.5 is a Windows-based file renaming utility by Alex Fauland. I was recently in a tight spot when I had to change the case of over 10,000 image files as part of the import of a new catalogue range into an e-commerce website. The suppliers of the database had obviously only tested on a platform that wasn’t case-sensitive (i.e. Windows) because hundreds, perhaps even thousands of them didn’t match up with the file names used in the product records. Thankfully, Alex’s free software saved me from tearing my hair out.

Firebug

There are so many things to like about Firebug, but I think the most valuable feature by far is the inspection tool. If you’ve ever worked on web pages that are styled with a large number of CSS classes then you’ll understand just how much of a tangled mess it can be when you’re trying to figure out what CSS rules are in force across different elements of the page. For example, you may have a link in a list that’s not displaying in the expected font. Now, is it the CSS class of link or perhaps the list item? Maybe it’s the font of the unordered list or one of the divs that it inherits from? Firebug can quickly tell you the CSS that’s in effect just by pointing at an element on your web page.

Another likeable feature is the ability to edit HTML and CSS directly through your browser. This negates the need to constantly upload new versions of files when you’re tweaking code.

Note that this is a Firefox add-on and as such requires Firefox as a prerequisite!

Maian Support

Maian Support is a helpdesk script with many of the features you’d find in some other infinitely more expensive systems like Kayako’s eSupport including:

• Multiple support departments each with their own user groups.
• Built-in knowledge base for storing FAQs and tutorials.
• Attachments in support tickets.
• Live support module.
• CAPTCHA to prevent spam submissions.
• Automatically close unanswered tickets after a specified period.
• Template-driven design.
• And much more!

There are plenty of commercial alternatives that are nowhere near as good as these applications so their authors deserve a big thank you from me.

Thank you!

Technorati Tags: Free software