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I won’t name any blogs, but I have seen this on several blogs. Every once in a while, either as a regular feature or just a once-in-a-while thing, they post what might be described as “sexy pictures”. Nothing explicit, nothing that would be illegal anywhere, but not exactly family-friendly either.

I am not a prude and personally I’m not offended by the imagery.  I’m definitely not about to tell any other blogger what they should or should not do on their blog. That said, I do want to share with you three reasons as to why I think posting “sexy stuff” on your blog may not a good idea -

Offending your visitors

I want to get this one out of the way. Maybe you couldn’t care less and that would be ok, but just keep in mind that you may be alienating some people. Even if your post or imagery are relatively benign, they may trigger some unwelcome responses, not to mention adult-oriented spam.

Consider also that some people may be browsing from their work place where standards may be stricter, or from home where younger family members may be about with the parent not expecting anything out of the ordinary when browsing for blogging advice.

Google Ads

If you run Google Adsense ads on your blog, you could be in trouble if you run them alongside anything that may be considered “adult stuff”. It can be a thin line between legitimate “sexy” and forbidden “adult”, so why risk your account? The same could apply to other advertisers – current or future ones.

Google Search Filters

Perhaps most importantly, saucy images and the accompanying comments could trigger Google’s search filters. That would mean searchers who have their settings to either moderate or strict search filters won’t be seeing your pages in the search results. Why get your site flagged like that? Is it really worth it?

Can you imagine your world without the little green bar?

You may just have to get used to the idea as many SEO experts think this exactly where we’re heading.

Google has been hinting about this for a while now. Google reps have mentioned this on their webmasters FAQ a while ago -

Don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner.

In a more recent move, Google sends us yet another hint. Google Webmasters Tools no longer displays you Pagerank. Yup, the most official indication of your Pagerank is now gone.

The next logical step for Google to take is to remove the green bar from their toolbar as well.

The World without Google Pagerank

Granted, your average web surfer has no idea what pagerank even means. Yet, what about that part of the web dealing with constructing and promoting websites and blogs? how will the disappearance of Pagerank affect us?

Here are some possible effects:

1. No more endless blog posts and forum threads about “when is the next pagerank update” followed by an endless stream of “My pagerank went up/down!!!” when it actually happens.
2. No more stupid replies from webmasters/bloggers who won’t exchange links with you because “your blog is only PR2 and mine is PR4″.
3. No more sites that exist solely to let you know what your pagerank is.
4. No more relying on this so-easy-to-manipulate metric when buying/selling websites.

In other words, the thing to say once Pagerank is gone is: good riddance.

What do you think? Can you live without knowing what your site’s PR is?

I’ve seen so many webmasters obsess over keyword density. My latest encounter with this practice was while submitting an article to ezinearticles.

My naturally written articles kept getting rejected by their site because of “keyword density” issues. They measured word ratio and key phrase ratio and ignored synonyms. To adhere to their demands, I opened up a thesaurus and started using synonyms. Only did it for one article, then I simply gave up on submissions.

See, I believe in naturally flowing text. I don’t want to be counting words when writing. I want the search engines to gradually evolve until they can read texts as a human being does, rather than changing my writing to fit into what some people think the algorithm’s variables are.

That’s why posts like the one Matt Cutts made today make me happy. He refers to a post on the Google blog by Google engineer Steven Baker that discusses how Google’s trying to make computers understand language. The general idea being semantics are more than keyword density.

Google’s algorithm can actually read synonyms and even put them within context. This is so much more complex than number of times a keyword appears in your text, so stop worrying about that and just write naturally…

So, what is up with the much awaited Caffeine?

Back in November 11th I had blogged about Matt Cutts’s announcement that Caffeine won’t be launched until “after the holidays”. At the time, Matt said Google decided to wait with the launch of their highly acclaimed new algorithm update out of consideration for webmasters. The idea was to keep the search results stable over the high season of shopping time.

It didn’t really make sense to me back then. In my post, I said that if Google had a better algorithm, producing better and faster results for end users, they should not avoid launching out of consideration for webmasters. After all, there’s only so much web traffic and one webmaster’s loss is another’s gain.

Well, it’s been over two months now. And almost two weeks into 2010 and still no sign of Caffeine.

In Israel, with major holidays coming up twice a year, the term “after the holidays” takes on a special meaning. “After the holidays” being the ultimate excuse for all those things you plan on postponing endlessly and forever.

No, I don’t think Google is going to postpone the rollover forever. I do wonder what’s making them wait so long though. Is it the recent China business? or were issues with caffeine itself the real reason behind the “after the holidays” delay?

Just went over the latest headlines in my RSS Reader, as I try to do once a week, and share some of the gems with you here. This time proved to be more difficult than others: way way too many “Happy New Year” lines, way too many compilations of “xx Best yy of 2009″ and “xx best yy of the decade”. Bleh! It’s just a date, folks, get over it.

Not that all of them sucked terribly. Some were interesting, some were funny, some even important. I’ve mentioned some of them in the last News and Reviews post.  From this week’s crop, here are a couple about 2009 -

Tweetup and Hashtag Make the List of Top 2009 Words

TenYears: The Biggest Product Flops of the Decade

And two more, these are even more interesting, as they try to predict future trends:

Facebook: 5 Predictions for 2010

Google’s 2009: A Glimpse of the Web’s Next Decade – a mix of 2009 summary and some predictions.

I have to say, there wasn’t much else going on this week, in terms of exciting web news. I mean, even John Mayer’s call for digital cleansing, which even Google’s Matt Cutts joined, was about only cutting off Twitter and social media. Blogs and websites weren’t supposed to be included. I guess maybe it’s just this kind of a week, where most people struggle between digesting huge amount of holiday turkey and dealing with New Year’s after-party effects?

Well, I guess I’ll just join in today with a belated Happy TwentyTen!

I can’t believe it’s taken me over a week to get back to my RSS reader and go over the latest headlines and bylines.

2009 Reports and Summaries

It’s December, the end of 2009 and some interesting end of year reports have been published.

Facebook published its list of trending topics this year. Rather than just showing trending keywords, they actually grouped some keywords together to reflect a trending topic. So, for example, “celebrity deaths” at number four reflects Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze and Billy Mays.

Another interesting, and if I may say so, rather upsetting list, was published by Norton. It’s their list of the top 100 searches made by kids, based on data collected by their software across millions of homes. I can only hope people simply don’t know how to use their software properly, so that the data also includes searches made by adults. Otherwise, the results scare me, with porn being at #4 for kids aged 7 and under!

To end the lists with something nicer, if you’re a Mom Blogger, you should check Mashable’s latest feature: The Top 2009 Social Media Trends for Moms.

SEO Highlights

As always, lots of SEO related news on the web. I found these to be particularly interesting:

Randfish from SEOMoz reviews how personalized search results could effect your site’s traffic in his How Personalized Search Changes SEO (and Doesn’t). He predicts that big brands are going to get an even bigger slice of the pie and competition for those long-end phrases will become harder.

Bill Slawski discusses the use of synonyms in Google’s algorithm. Basing his post on quotes from the actual algorithm patent, he analyzes some examples to show you Google may or may not be implementing this in the SERP’s.  How Google May Expand Searches Using Synonyms for Words in Queries – well worth a read.

On a more practical note, I found this piece by Julie Joyce useful: 8 Steps To Avoid Link Analysis Paralysis.

And Some More

Jason Kincaid from Tech Crunch discusses a feature of Chrome which I really like: Google Browser Size Helps Keep Your Content Above The Fold. It’s so true. When I first tried Chrome, my initial reaction was, “There’s so much space on my screen now!” For marketers, this is a relevant issue and Jason provides a very neat link there, to Google Labs Browser Size Page.

Speaking of Google, this one piece here on Mashable discusses Google Wave’s Massive Potential for Business Users. Given Wave has been given a lot of bad rap lately, it provides a refreshing look at what’s supposed to be the ultimate social application of the future.

Last, (and maybe least), is this piece in Mashable again: HOW TO: Outsmart Phishers. The writers have disclaimers all over the place about this being a humorous article, yet  it is exactly what they do at 419 Eater. I’d never do it myself, but it sure is funny.

Uh oh… not another post about the dofollow issue?

Blame Extreme John who just posted about removing nofollow blogs from his RSS reader. Since even the mighty Google thinks I’m an authority on the subject (this blog is ranked in the top ten results for “dofollow blogs”), I figured I need to give my input… again.

In his post, Extreme John refers to mutual linkjuice gifts and a “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” concept. I’d like to present a slightly different angle on this. I don’t dofollow with other bloggers in mind – I dofollow with surfers in mind. Here’s why.

The Heated Dofollow Debate

If you look at Extreme John’s post and the following comments, you could easily get the impression that most webmasters passionately support dofollow. In my experience, this is not the case.

Take Sitepoint Forums. If you want to start thread with lots of replies, use the word “dofollow” in the title. Supporting dofollow on blog comments over there is a surefire way to get flamed (no pun intended). If the people are in a good mood, they’ll just tell you you’re wasting your time. They could also mark you for a spammer.

To be honest, they have a point. Dofollow blogs can become spam magnets. Just visit the darker side over at the DP forums and run a search for dofollow blogs. Spammers all over the place, selling lists of dofollow blogs along with spam bots that will do the dirty work for you.

Thus, my first instinct was to go nofollow, because that’s what the “good guys” recommended. But then I gave the matter some thought and you can read more about my conclusions in this post. Bottom line – nofollow blogs get as much spam as dofollow blogs and it’s up to the blogger to click the “spam” link and trash the spam comments.

One more point for nofollow supporters to consider

Google (and other Search Engines) keep telling us that serving different versions of your page to surfers and search engines is a big No No. That’s why cloaking is a good way to get your site banned from the SERP’s.

I argue that the nofollow tag is in fact a form of cloaking. It’s showing your surfer one thing – a link to another site – while telling the search engine to ignore that very link.

If you think the link is bad, don’t have it on your blog. That’s part of your blogger duties and that’s why you should always monitor your comments and have spam filters in place.

If you think the link is valid, legitimate and useful to your visitors, there is no reason in the world to hide it from the search engines.

Nofollow has in facr become a tool for linkjuice channeling, aka link sculpting. By definition, it creates one picture of the web for users and another for search engines.

Now, if Google, or anyone else, wishes to devalue comment links in their algorithm, or to disregard them completely, that is entirely up to them. As a web publisher, I just want to have a clean page with no behind-the-scenes changes in the code that my surfers can’t see.

The next BIG Google algorithm update one is named after a very much abused substance (legal, of course, imagine if they were to name this one cocaine instead?)

Much like the real stuff, it’s been driving some web publishers up the wall, especially those who are currently ranked high on the SERP’s for good keywords, waiting to cash on their good positions during the Holidays shopping season.

Well, they can now relax, as Google’s Matt Cutts officially announced that Caffeine won’t be implemented until after the Holidays.

Isn’t it amazing just how powerful Google has become? It is a search engine after all. As such, it  was supposed to reflect what’s hot and what’s not on the web. Instead, we see once again how Google landscapes web traffic patterns rather than merely tracking them.

Not that there is much to be done about that, of course, but such “benevolent” moves by Google towards webmasters do bother me. As a surfer, I don’t want Google to give me what it considers to be “not as useful” results just out of consideration for webmasters. If you think Caffeine generates better search results, by all means, bring it on. Maybe it’s the hundreds of millions of customers you should be considering, not the thousands of merchants?

As a webmaster too, actually. You may be helping some websites, but by definition that means you’re taking traffic away from someone else. People will shop online this year – the question is which sites will be delivered by Google’s top search results to win the jackpot.

Disclaimer: I have dozens of websites and no, I haven’t tested them on the Caffeine sandbox, so I don’t know if I will be making less money or more after the roll out.

In my previous post, I explained why I disable the nofollow tag on blog comments and why I seek out similar blogs to interact with and add my insightful, intelligent, useful comments (does that sound vain or what?)

Looks like I’m not the only one looking for dofollow blogs. Google’s own keyword research tool shows that there are tens of thousands of searches for various combinations of the word “dofollow” every month. So, how does a webmaster find these dofollow blogs?

First Things First – Recognizing the Curse

Pretty but cursed?

I was telling my 8 year old son about SEO the other day, describing it all as this fascinating game with battles to fight and scores to win. After explaining pagerank and “link juice” I got to the “nofollow” part. “You see, Ron, a link with a nofollow has an invisible curse on it and so it cannot pass on the link points,” I told him.

For regular surfers, there is no way to know when a link has a nofollow tag. As a webmaster you could, of course, look at the source code, but you probably prefer a faster way to tell which is which.

Fortunately, Firefox has several plug-ins that do just that. These are mostly SEO plug-ins that have lots of bells and whistles, but they all perform one simple function as well: they highlight nofollow links so you can easily tell which blog “cursed” the comment links. I use Quirk Search Status Add-on for Firefox but you can search around and see if something else suits your needs better.

Dofollow Lists and Directories

With Wordpress, the most popular blogging platform, having nofollow turned on by default, how do you find those blogs that enable comment affection?

Googling for dofollow brings up quite a few websites and pages that try to create lists of dofollow blogs. Some of them move on to create an entire directory around this, sorting the blogs out by PageRank and/or topic. Here’s the problem though -

• Lists are not up to date – For whatever reason, blog owners change their settings and switch nofollow back on.
• Lists have mostly SEO/webmasters blogs in them. That’s fine if that happens to be your area, but if you’re looking to interact with other kinds of blogs, you’re out of luck.

Actively Searching for DoFollow Blogs

How can you find Dofollow blogs through a search engine like Google? After all, not only are we looking for an attribute in the source code, we are actually looking for blogs that do not have that attribute.

What we can look for is an image that some bloggers (myself included) display on their blogs to tell the world that they dofollow. You can look for the image files through Google, or use the Google image search for “U comment, I follow”. The file names to look for are -

ifollowblue.gif, ifollowgreen.gif, ifollowltgreen.gif, ifollowpink.gif, ifollowpurple.gif, ifolloworange.gif, ifollowwhite.gif, ifollowmagenta.gif.

Remember: always check to make sure these really are dofollow blogs. Watch out for blog owners who don’t even know what dofollow means and put up the image to indicate that they will comment back on blog posts in your blog. Yes, some bloggers think that “u comment, I follow”, means that they will personally follow your blog link to comment back on your blog…

Putting it All Together

So, here is my own strategy for finding dofollow blogs that work for me:

1. Start by going over existing lists/directories of dofollow blogs and find the ones that are on-topic and are indeed dofollow. This is a time consuming phase and in my experience, most of the blogs listed are in fact nofollow.
2. Searching Google for the IFollow images (as explained above) and finding the gems.
3. Make a list of quality blogs that are indeed worth interacting with. These should be blogs that are on-topic and actually worth reading. Make sure that the comments are well-moderated. I have yet to see a dofollow blog with spam comments that retained its Pagerank!
4. Keep track by visiting regularly (I add them to my Google Reader to track new posts) and when a post of interest comes up, read, comment and interact.

It may be time consuming, but look at the benefits. You get to know people and truly interact with fellow bloggers that cover the same topic as you. Hopefully, these people monitor their comments carefully and weed out anything spammy, so you get quality backlinks too.

Now, if you decide to do that and want to share some of your findings, or if you want to offer your blog as a fellow dofollow blog, do leave me a comment about it. After all, if it’s good… you get a link back