Internet Business Blog

As part of my new interest in the stock market, last week, I bought a share in Google at just under the $700 mark. With hindsight, the stock would have been an excellent purchase back when it first went public in 2004 at sub-$100 or even just a few months ago like another blogger whose 5 shares bought at $2399.80 are now worth in the region of $3465. That’s a 44% return in just 7 months, if that stock was sold now.

Some say that due to Google’s current position in the market as the USA’s most popular search engine, there’s not much hope for future growth or a return on any investment, but considering their stock was priced at sub-$500 at the beginning of 2007 means they’ve increased in value by 40% in the last 11 months alone so I’d say there was still plenty of potential left.

One of the great things about Google is their ability to diversify. They may have started out as the geek’s choice of search engine, but just look at them now; email providers, domain name registrars, payment processing, offering their search technology to the corporate sector, telecommunications, mapping, social networking, and even renewable energy.

No growth potential?

Now, Google don’t pay out any dividends so the only way for me to make any money with the stock is to sell my share. I guess time will tell whether I get a return back on my investment.

Here’s an interesting read; see what people were saying about Google stock just before they went public.

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

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

By now, the world and his dog are aware of Google acquiring FeedBurner and offering their previously paid services for free.

Well, I’m not going to make you read any more of what you already know, but one thing I did find interesting is that the deal may open up Google’s bag of secrets.

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Stu’s posted 11 reasons why my blog might suck. I don’t think most apply (I’ll await his review of my blog before responding to the rest), but here’s my response to those that might.

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