Tag Archives: Google

FAQ: What are follow and nofollow links?

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Follow and nofollow links refer to a tag that can be placed in the linking (anchor) code of your website.  It usually comes in the form of the “rel” attribute.  It looks something like this:

<a href=”http://www.jtgraphic.net” rel=”nofollow”>jtGraphicn.net</a>

Why are these attributes on links important?  They help organize the internet and give relevancy to websites that deserve it and don’t give relevancy to websites that don’t.  Google and other search engines use this information in the “rel” attribute to tabulate the score, or authority, that one website gives to another.

Getting a large number of follow links increases the relevancy of your website for the keywords relevant to the link.  Usually the “anchor text” or text between the <a>…</a> tags is what most directly contributes to keyword relevancy.  When websites build in areas where users can submit their own information, they tend to use nofollow links to reduce spam related link follows.  Simply neglecting to include a “rel” attribute makes a link a “follow” link.

You can get follow links many places, including top comments areas on blogs, guest posting, press coverage, and article submission sites.  There are a ton of other places to get follow links as well.  What do you find is the best way to get follow links?

How to Build and Drive Website Traffic

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Probably the single biggest question about building websites I get is how to drive traffic. I’m not saying it’s the most important part, but it’s definitely key. Content is king, sure, but if you don’t have traffic, you could be pouring your heart out to a wall. Really what every website wants is quality, converting, long-lasting traffic in high volumes.

There are essentially four ways to drive to your website, which are: search engines, direct traffic, referral links, and your ‘list’. I’m going to teach you how each of those things work on an intermediate level and what their value is compared to the others. I’ll be covering some of the more detailed finer points of these traffic sources in the future. This is basically a primer for what is to come.

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Google Image Swirl Makes Finding the Perfect Image Easier

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Check out this great new tool from Google: Google Image Swirl.

Basically what it does is allows you to dial in images based on how close they are to the last image you selected.  For instance, you can search for cats and keep selecting cats until you find the exact one you’re looking for.  They take image properties into account, such as color and face composition.  I could be crazy, but it also looked like it was pulling out expressions.  Here’s an image of my experiment with cats:

Zac Johnson did a great writeup on how this is relevant to you and your Facebook ad campaigns.  I think it’s also relevant to the many other ad platforms as well.

Automated Way to Find Google Pagerank

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I was looking for an automated way to get Google Pagerank for a few hours and came up with quite a few things, but not many of them were very elegant.  Essentially, Google doesn’t provide an API and it’s against their terms of service to hit them up in an automated way.  I found quite a few places that have come up with close algorithms and calculate PR for sites, but that’s just not accurate enough for me.  The other option is to hit their PR URL that the toolbar uses.  For example:

http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&hl=en&ch=61470319184&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fforums.digitalpoint.com%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D164713

That returns the PR of Digital Point Forums, where I found that information, but you can’t change the reference URL, because of a checksum.  That’s the &ch= variable in the URL.  I’m working on a project that needs to look up PR on the fly though, so that just won’t work.  I ended up finding a script that I could use, but the guy didn’t put his URL in the comments, and I since can’t find it – oops.  I think he deserves a pat on the back though.  If this belongs to you, or you know who’s it is, let me know.

I tweaked the script and installed it on my Toolerific.com website.  Now you can go there and check the PR of any site without a captcha, which is nice.  The tool is here.

Now, the best automated way to check pagerank is to hit that site with cURL and take out the value of the HTML tag with the id “value”.  The reason that is the best automated way to do it is because Google may change their checksum rules and that will break the source code that I used to generate it, but that site will always be laid out like that, so you don’t have to worry about changing anything.  If you want the code I used, you can view it here.

Update: This doesn’t seem to work ALL of the time.  I suspect it has something to do with the checksum, but can’t figure it out.  Seems to be about 27% of the time, which isn’t great odds, but it works MOST of the time.  I’ll keep you posted if I find out more.

Google stalks you. Did you know?

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I was reading an article over at PPC.bz about how Google links your social contacts to its index to improve your search results.  This is the first I had heard of the service, which is called Google Social Circle.  Click this link to see what social information Google has about you. The service has been around since October of 2009, but this is the first I had heard of it.  You’d think they would announce something like this, especially amidst all of the Facebook privacy news.  You’ll need a Google account and be logged in for the link to work properly.

Barman from PPC.bz basically equates the whole thing to information rape, because they’re taking fondling your privacy.  I don’t agree with that so much, because I feel more like they’re harvesting public information, and everything I put on the web I assume will be public anyways.  That being said, I still wish they told me.

My view is more in line with Bobbi Newman, who says: “Google’s Social Circle & Social Search may not violate any privacy laws but it gives me the creeps.” This is a lot like finding out that you have a stalker – only this one isn’t human, which might be even a little more creepy.  If this technology truly does increase relevancy, I suppose I support it, but I still feel like they were shady about it’s implementation.

In reality this is a lot like XFN search engines, which will probably be the next evolution in social networks.  I’m actually amazed that people aren’t building more of them to compete with Facebook.  It will be interesting how the privacy issues and technology develop with this.

What do you think about it’s privacy implications?

The Internet – A Small Town in Cyberspace

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Internet Cafe

Users at an internet cafe in China

The internet is a community like any other town in the world.  It has people, transportation, communication, media, and many other features of actual cities and towns.  The people that spend their time working and playing online have developed relationships with others in a way that people become friends in real life (I hate saying “in real life” too, because despite some arguments The Internet IS “real life”.  It just takes place in a different locale – anyways, I digress).

Transportation

Google is the backbone of Internet transportation, serving as the largest central hub for directing traffic.  There are other modes of transportation such as MSN, Yahoo, or the once defunct, rising once again Ask.com.  Unlike our physical world, we can transport ourselves directly to a new address.

We can also move fluidly from one website to another – each link becoming a road, moving away from where we were last.  I suppose some peoples’ goal would be to get as many roads leading to their house or place of business.  Others may even charge a toll to use their roads (subscription services).

Friends & Communication

The amazing thing about this new world is that the barrier for entry to communicate is extremely low.  Anyone can get their 15 minutes of fame by creating the next most popular viral video.  We can build relationships with people that we have never met in person before.  People even work for businesses from the other side of the world without ever setting foot in their physical offices.

We can build, maintain, and document our relationships with others on our websites, through Facebook, or through a much lesser known standard: XFN.  Sharing information with friends in our community is extremely easy – and almost overwhelming at times.  Many people blog, and those blogs can be aggregated to one place through RSS, putting so much information at our fingertips.

We talk through chat, web conferencing, and internet telephony like Skype.  Any person can stand at their podium on streaming sites like USTREAM or Justin.tv and talk to their viewers, not unlike a person standing at a podium in Central Park.  People can even get together for a quick soccer game in our virtual community.

Media

The new newspaper is Twitter and the new televisions are YouTube and Hulu.  Social media is adding new dimensions to media and news is being reported and shared at alarming speeds.  I find it amazing how quickly an Amber Alert can permeate Twitter even if it’s fake.

It’s interesting to see how traditional media is still having trouble keeping up and people that can adapt are taking advantage of that gap.  Internet performance marketers all over the world are stepping up and representing huge corporations and usurping advertising dollars from the traditional power houses.  This new media is so enticing for business, because compensation is based entirely on performance – much like 100% commission sales people.  No, it’s not like that.  It is that.  Businesses ALWAYS have an unlimited budget for positive returns on ROI.

So what other ways does the Internet seem like a small town to you?  or a big town?

Saving Bandwidth with Google Ajax Libraries API

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The News

I first heard about the new Google AJAX Libraries API from Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog.  He mentions using it to reduce WordPress bandwidth, but really it can be used to reduce bandwidth in most AJAX based web development environments.

The Exciting Part

I persoanlly use prototype the most, and I’m extremely excited that I can use their libraries instead of uploading my own for each site.  I’m especially excited that calling specific version numbers is possible.  This makes upgrading a code set extremely simple, especially if you call the code version as a variable at the beginning of your code.

Realistically your javascript code is probably one of the lightest weight parts of your code, but every little bit helps, especially if you’re serving a large amount of users every month.

Optional Settings

Script Compression

I think one of the greatest optional settings for all of the scripts you can load is compression.  It’s not available for all of the APIs, but it is for most.  What it does is remove all of the whitespace from the API to reduce file size for the end user – increasing speed.  If you mix that with something like the javascript compiling on Google Chrome and you’ll have lightning fast AJAX applications.

No CSS

You can optionally remove the CSS from the scripts you’re remotly loading, which allows you to do one of three things: load the default CSS, load your own CSS, or not load the CSS at all.

Resources

WordPress.org: Google AJAX Libraries API Plugin – This plugin uses the GALA whereever possible in your WordPress installation.

Google AJAX APIs Blog – This is a great place to go if this really iterests you and you’ll be using this code regularly.  They’re always adding new scripts to the API, so if you don’t see the one you want yet, keep an eye on their blog.

Google Image Search Gets Upgraded

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google_logoGoogle image search has always been a great tool for finding images of things, but it has never been great for really dialing down what you want based on the image composition.  They’ve recently added the ability to dial down your search by image type, which is great for finding specific things that you want.  For instance: I can search for line drawings of vermont.  Interestingly that search brings up a lot of maps.  Maybe in the future, they will add “maps” as a criteria.

Comparison

Google image search still isn’t as robust as something like iStockPhoto, but I think that is probably the culprit of some sort of technical difference in their systems (i.e. Google is indexing images and iStockPhoto is all user submitted images).  Because iStockPhoto has user submitted entries, they can enter meta data that Google just can’t derive from just the image.

Capabilities

Right now, you can filter image searches by news content, faces, clip art, line drawings, and photo content.  They are using photo recognition and search data to add additional meta data to the images.  For instance, the news content option checks the surrounding text around the images for meta data that pertains to news.  They can use photo recognition algorithms for recognizing facial structures in the images.

The Future?

I’m hoping maybe someday they will add features similar to iStockPhoto like color recognition and content layout.  Color layout is something that I’ve been looking forward to for a while now.  It’d make it really easy to pick up images that go with a specific theme in a website design or something to that effect.

Google Calendar / Outlook Sync

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I’ve been looking for a way to sync my Google / Outlook 2007 calendar for a bit (2 ways), and the built in Outlook features allow you to add an internet calendar, but it needs to be public and doesn’t show in your calendar view on your email page. it’s also one way. I found a solution that worked, but it was sort of a hack job, so I didn’t really stand behind it.

THEN! I noticed “Sync with Microsoft Outlook™ calendarNew!” in the top right area of my calendar. It took me about 2 seconds to decide to click the link and download the application. This thing is great! If you can’t see the URL on your Google Calendar, go here:

http://www.google.com…answer.py?answer=89955

Let me know if you have any issues in the comments.  I’m interested in what they might be.

-JKT

Update: If you’re using Windows Vista and Outlook 2007, for some reason, sometimes the application cannot connect and sync for the first time if you have Outlook open. Just close Outlook and sync for the first time. Voila!