BPWrap

SEO Factories Lose Their Edge

Barry Welford — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:06:54 +0000

Even back in 2005, Stoney deGeyter had the following thoughts on Finding the Perfect SEO Firm:

SEO companies come in all shapes and sizes. You’ve got your solo SEOs that either

do everything themselves and/or

sub-contract out many aspects of each campaign while maintaining a tight control on the quality and results of the project.

Then you have your big SEO firms that employ 20+ employees that handle various aspects of your account. These firms can often turn into SEO factories and can lack the ability to treat each client individually, because everything is done in bulk.

Since then, Google has certainly made it even more difficult for that ‘bulk’ approach. In this guest post, Christine Adams gives a current view on how those SEO factories are making out.

Introduction

In the last five years, search engine optimization (SEO) has become better known among mainstream professionals across multiple industries. In its infancy, SEO was not widely understood, which allowed for dubious companies to take advantage of website owners who were flush with cash and desperate to increase traffic. Today, many more people who own websites are at least familiar with search engines like Google. They have a basic understanding that adding meta tags alone will not provide the rankings and traffic that a comprehensive SEO campaign can provide and are savvy enough to avoid scammers.

SEO service providers who offered legitimate services and could show results began to see real profits. In recent years, Fortune 500 companies like Reuters-Thompson / Findlaw and LexisNexis have launched Internet marketing divisions and picked up significant sales in the SEO and Internet marketing industry. These large firms are in a position of (nearly) unlimited resources, with sales reps all over the country soliciting the clients with the biggest pockets. With so much fresh meat, these companies have found themselves with a problem; how to fill more orders with a minimum increase in staffing.

Scaling SEO

In the attempt to make SEO scalable, large Internet marketing firms have had to rethink how they do SEO. Instead of assigning a number of clients to one SEO specialist – which would limit profitability by having to hire a new SEO specialist for every x number of new clients – the SEO client has become just another cog on the assembly line. Instead of qualified professionals, large firms have enough clients where they can hire less qualified workers and train them to do one task only – i.e. only doing meta tags, or only doing article writing. In theory, this seems much more efficient; in practice, SEO and “efficiency” don’t go hand in hand.

By giving the same links and the same exact treatment to each client, certain risks present themselves. Let’s look at two cases;

Closed-Network Reciprocal Links

One of these Fortune 500 companies has recently moved to reduce costs and increase efficiency by using web properties they already own; their sites and their clients’ sites. Links to other clients are placed on each client’s ‘resource’ page, essentially creating a closed network of reciprocal links. Should Google find some sites spammy, the entire network is ‘infected’.

Buying High PR Links

Another large firm that did over $17M in SEO sales in 2008 found traditional SEO means unscalable as well; their solution was to buy paid links in bulk on high PR sites from a third party service and outsource content writing. The obvious problem with this solution is that this isn’t really SEO, as you’re only providing temporary links, which result in temporary rankings. Once you stop paying for the text links, you lose all rankings. On the other hand, this firm might benefit from this effect, as it would keep customers paying!

In reality, both of these ’solutions’ for scaling SEO are bad for the customer, as each company has put all its eggs in one basket. A good SEO campaign should contain a diverse array of white-hat (Google-approved) links and should be able to change strategy on the drop of a dime to keep up with ever changing search engine algorithms. Are workers with limited training on assembly lines able to change gears the day, week or month after search engines change algorithms? Me thinks not.

Christine Adams is a SEO specialist at Sequoia Marketing and a contributing writer to SEO blogs, including LawyerSEO.org.

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SEO Factories Lose Their Edge

SEO Gets Simpler In 2009

Barry Welford — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:04:03 +0000

During the last 12 months at least, some SEO clients have apparently been paying sizeable fees for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work that was completely ineffective. That really is the bottom line on a development that Danny Sullivan describes in a post entitled, PageRank Sculpting Is Dead! Long Live PageRank Sculpting!

Earlier this month, Google’s Matt Cutts sent a shockwave through the advanced SEO community by saying that site owners could no longer perform “PageRank sculpting” using the nofollow tag in the way they’d previously thought.

Google helped advanced the notion of using nofollow to flow PageRank. No one was forced to do it; no one is being punished that it might no longer work. But Google did help put it out there, and that’s why it should have spoken up sooner when it took nofollow out as a sculpting tool. Instead, it said nothing about the change that happened sometime from May 2008 or earlier.

.. and why did Google not spill the beans earlier:

At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t. In retrospect, we’ve changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn’t notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise. So we started to provide other guidance that PageRank sculpting isn’t the best use of time.

Danny Sullivan then provides the following view on how it all now works:

Google itself solely decides how much PageRank will flow to each and every link on a particular page. In general, the more links on a page, the less PageRank each link gets. Google might decide some links don’t deserve credit and give them no PageRank. The use of nofollow doesn’t ‘conserve’ PageRank for other links; it simply prevents those links from getting any PageRank that Google otherwise might have given them.

I was moved to write this post today by an e-mail message I received from Dan Thies of SEO Fast Start. He revealed that he was in two minds as to whether he should roll back the Site Structure chapter in SEO Fast Start, and basically go back to what he was teaching in 2006. He has some concerns about what some folks have done with "PageRank sculpting" since he has seen more mistakes than good implementations with that technique.

Dan Thies is the author of a free 97-page ebook, SEO Fast Start 2008, that you can download. Interestingly the preface includes the following:

The 2008 edition is not much different from last year’s – because if you’re not trying to game the search engines, very little changes. Heck, if you had a copy of the November 2001 edition, your site wouldn’t exactly burn down if you followed what I wrote then.

It appears that once more that French phrase applies that translates as, The more it changes, the more it stays the same. I still believe that the word PageRank is being used in at least two senses in these discussions. Underlying this is the basic PageRank measure that applies to all URLs as suggested in the PageRank Calculation – Null Hypothesis. Thereafter that basic value is used within the keyword search algorithms in a modified way as Danny Sullivan pointed out above.

Even if PageRank sculpting is no longer the hot topic it was, there are still key issues to address with the most important being to Avoid Duplicate Content Problems.

Other resources you may find helpful are:

7-Minute SEO Guide by Andy Beal
SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day (Book via Amazon)

Never forget that of course SEO is only part of the answer to getting better business results online. You really have to start off with the right strategy and follow through to good usability of the website and making the sales. The series of articles on Marketing Right Now is a useful primer on the total process.

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SEO Gets Simpler In 2009

Opera Unite For Your Own Web Hosting

Barry Welford — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:12:26 +0000

Opera Unite reinvents the Web, according to Opera who feel that cloud computing and Web-based applications will never be the same.

Seth Rosenblatt at Cnet thinks Opera may have something interesting as it tries to Unite users across browsers.

The Web server is interesting, as well. Being able to host a Web page from your desktop computer, without having to worry about paying somebody for the privilege, has the potential to usher in a new age of Web hosting where the only cost is what you pay your ISP and there’s no middle-man to go through. However, the most popular things to do online that require your own site–sharing media and writing blogs–can be done effectively and cheaply from third-party hosts. Still, Unite-based Web-serving has potential.

What as yet has not been sufficiently discussed are the security aspects of allowing others to use your computer as a server. Some feel that Opera’s Unite Is One Incredibly Bad Idea

Then there are the security implications. Unite lets users set permission levels for who can access their files, but one of these levels appears to be "completely open." That doesn’t sound good. Ostensibly, you’re sharing files with people you know, but I could envision someone setting up a link to their Opera Unite service that leads people to a file that’s really malware.

For most of us, we will stick to traditional web hosting. There are many fine hosting services that are economical and reliable throughout North America. Even if we all become confident that Opera Unite can be the way we share some of our online properties, undoubtedly this will be complemented by a standard web hosting arrangement.

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Opera Unite For Your Own Web Hosting

Making Complex Purchases

Barry Welford — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:36:18 +0000

As Dave Brock points out, People Don’t Like To Be Sold—But They Do Like To Buy!

How do we facilitate the customer’s buying process? It’s a few simple things, but that can have great meaning to the customer—again much is focused on educating and informing. Things like: What are the questions they should be asking—of you and of your competitors? What should their expectations of a solution be? Are they realistic, unrealistic? What are the pitfalls involved in selecting a solution? What are the things they should be considering, but not thinking about?

Although many company owners may not realize it, one of the most complex purchase decisions they have is how to ‘buy’ their website. If the website is to be a Powerful Sales Representative, then careful Website Planning is involved. A website is as complex as an automobile and it is far too easy to create a website that is "Unsafe At Any Speed".

Given the ever evolving complexity of multiple browsers and a wide variety of devices, the only safe and sure way to avoid major disappointment is to carefully define the website functional specifications. To understand what that involves, it is worth checking out a sample website spec. Only with a carefully detailed specification can disaster be avoided.

Undoubtedly most websites can be seen by their designers and by the website owner in a satisfactory way on their preferred device/browser combination. However it must be seen in an attractive way by all their prospects with whatever device/browser combination they may be using. That takes the right functional specification to achieve that.

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Making Complex Purchases

PageRank Calculation – Null Hypothesis

Barry Welford — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:46:55 +0000

Summary

The SEO world continues to be shaken by the hints offered by Matt Cutts last week on the nofollow tag and PageRank Sculpting. Many seem shaken but perhaps people have made assumptions about PageRank that are not true. It is difficult to prove how things really work since Google remains cagey on what really happens. Here we offer a Null Hypothesis, a simple explanation, that people may wish to consider. This should only be replaced by a more complex view, when that can be proven to be better.

Introduction

Andy Beard is a keen observer of the Google scene and poses the key question following the Matt Cutts revelations last week: Is PageRank Sculpting Dead & Can Comments Kill Your PageRank?

Has Google in one quick swipe removed all benefit of Dynamic Linking (old school term) or PageRank sculpting (when it became “trendy”), and potentially caused massive penalties for sites nofollowing links for user generated content and comments?

Important articles he cites on this are:

Not everyone is so concerned and Andrew Goodman frankly states, PageRank Sculpting is Dead? Good Riddance.

How Is PageRank Calculated

The Google website is strangely obscure on how PageRank is calculated. There are a few explanations in Google Answers (no longer supported) by others on such issues as My Page Rank and Page Rank Definition – Proof of convergence and uniqueness. Phil Craven offers a reasonably straightforward account in Google’s PageRank Explained and how to make the most of it. That includes the following:

Notes:
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites.

The KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Sweetheart)

The problem in trying to estimate how the Google PageRank process works is that PageRank is only one of over 100 or more factors involved in how web pages rank in keyword searches. Any attempt to prove a given assumption about PageRank involves a typical statistical analysis where one tries to infer an explanation from somewhat fuzzy data. That is where the KISS principle comes in. In such a situation, we should perhaps rely on the approach favored by some great minds.

Of two competing theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred.: Occam of Occam’s Razor
A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.: Albert Einstein
The Null Hypothesis is presumed true until statistical evidence indicates otherwise.: Sir Roland Fisher

Given the Matt Cutts suggestions that some find perplexing, what is the simplest explanation of the Google PageRank process that could explain what is involved?

The Null Hypothesis

What the PageRank process attempts is mind-boggling. It aims to attach a PageRank value to any hyperlink in the total space of web pages and their inter links. It involves an iterative calculation since the values are interdependent. This PageRank can be considered as the probability that a random surfer (human or robot) will pass down that link as compared with all the other links in the total space (graph).

As Matt Cutts reminded us last week, even if a web page is excluded by its owner using a robots.txt file, it may still get into consideration if it is included in a sitemap file or has a link coming in from another external web page. Having an extra indicator on each link indicating whether it is influential in passing PageRank would increase the complexity of the data enormously. Given that, we propose the following Null Hypothesis (See foot of article for definition of this expression). This of course could be abandoned in favor of a more complex explanation if that could be proven statistically with sufficient confidence or if Google chose to provide a more correct explanation of what is done.

The Null Hypothesis runs as follows. The whole process splits into two phases. The first phase looks at all web pages (URLs) and all associated links to determine the PageRank of each web page and thus the contributions that would flow down each link. There are no exclusions and this calculation process handles all URLs in the total Internet space (graph). Modifiers that website owners may have applied such as robots.txt files or tags such as noindex, nofollow, etc. do not get involved at this stage. For all URLs and links without exception, values such as those illustrated below would be calculated.

The second phase of the process involves how these PageRank values are then used within the search algorithms. Here whatever is specified via robots.txt or nofollow tags would apply. The PageRank contribution from nofollow-ed links thus would not be included in the calculation. Also any filtering factors that Google may wish to apply for bad neighborhoods, etc. would only apply in this second phase. The underlying web pages and links would still have a first-phase PageRank calculated but this would in no way influence the second phase results.

This two-phase approach would seem to square with what we have been hearing recently. It is offered very much as a Null Hypothesis, so if someone has an Alternative Hypothesis, we look forward to hearing it. Over to you.

Implications of this Null Hypothesis

In the mean time, if this explanation is true, some obvious considerations apply. The basic PageRank calculation is determined by the total set of URLs and links. The PageRank value for a URL is never changed by modifications that apply in the second phase. All that happens in the second phase is that some of the PageRank contributions are ignored. So the effective PageRank that a URL has in the second phase is always less than or equal to what it had in the first phase. A URL can be more prominent solely because others become less prominent.

Significant changes can only come about through influences that affect the first phase. These relate to the site architecture rather than the interlinkages. That is after all what Matt Cutts was recommending.

Footnote:
See this link for an explanation of Null Hypothesis.

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PageRank Calculation – Null Hypothesis

Hanging / Dangling Web Pages Can Be PageRank Black Holes

Barry Welford — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 18:47:56 +0000

Summary

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for blogs is often not done effectively and posts rank below where they should be in keyword searches. One particular problem can be hanging/dangling web pages created by the blogging software coupled with inappropriate use of robots.txt files and tags. Such hanging web pages can act as sinks or black holes for PageRank, a key factor in the Google search algorithm. This article provides a simple explanation of the issues involved and appropriate solutions.

Introduction

"You are creating hanging/dangling pages", wrote Andy Beard in a recent comment on a post on Avoiding WordPress Duplicate Content. After an e-mail exchange, I could understand his concern. It is a potential problem that robots.txt files could create. As Andy wrote some time back, it is one of the SEO Linking Gotchas Even The Pros Make.

More recently, Rand Fishkin has pointed out that you should not Accidentally Block Link Juice with Robots.txt. Rand advised doing the following:

Conserve link juice by using nofollow when linking to a URL that is robots.txt disallowed
If you know that disallowed pages have acquired link juice (particularly from external links), consider using meta noindex, follow instead so they can pass their link juice on to places on your site that need it.

Link juice is just another term for PageRank. This PageRank value for any web page is an important element in how well it will rank in any keyword search. It may be one of over 100 factors but it probably is the most important in the Google keyword search process. Avoiding losing PageRank that a web page could amass is an important function that SEOs should pursue.

After doing some research, it turns out to be a somewhat more complex issue requiring an understanding of some weighty articles. Anyone involved in doing SEO or hiring an SEO consultant should be aware of the potential problem to ensure things are done correctly. I also realized that there was no simple explanation of the issues so this post will attempt to rectify that omission.

Research on Hanging / Dangling Web Pages

If you want to do some of your own research, before checking out the later explanations, I found the following useful:

Dangling Pages – WebProWorld SEO Forum
What Do SEO/SEM People Put In Robots.txt Files? – Shaun Anderson
WordPress robots.txt SEO – AskApache Web Development
Internal Linking – META nofollow, rel nofollow, robots.txt Confusion thereon – Josh Spaulding

Of course with search engine algorithms, things are always in evolution. The official word on the Google website gives the following information on rel="nofollow".

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

That lead to the practice of PageRank sculpting, whereby people try to manage how PageRank is distributed among the web pages in a website. More recently Matt Cutts of Google in a Q&A session at SMX Advanced 2009 in Seattle, WA, provided the current thinking on nofollow as recorded by Lisa Barone:

Q: It seems like you supported PageRank sculpting a year ago and now it seems like you don’t support it anymore. Why is that and will it become a negative indicator?

A: No, it won’t hurt your site. You can do your links however you want. You can use it to eliminate links to sign in forms and whatnot, but it is a better use of your time to fix your site architecture and fix the problem from the core. Suppose you have 10 links and 5 of them are nofollowed. There is this assumption that the other 5 links get ALL that PageRank and that may not be as true anymore (your leftover PageRank will now “evaporate”, says Matt.). You can’t shunt your PageRank where you want it to go. It’s not a penalty. It’s not going to get you in trouble. However, it’s not as effective. It’s a better use of your time to go make new content and do all the other things. If you’re using nofollow to change how PageRank flows, it’s like a band-aid. It’s better to build your site how you want PageRank to flow from the beginning.

Let us now try to pull all that together in a short number of simple explanations covering the important issues involved.

How PageRank is calculated

Google is not always completely open on what is involved in its search algorithms for obvious reasons. The algorithms also evolve as the Q&A quote above shows. The following is a best judgment on what is involved, but if anyone has corrections or modifications to what is shown, they are encouraged to add a comment.

The following diagram illustrates how PageRank is calculated for any web page and how fractions of the PageRank flow to and from linked web pages. PageRank here is not the value that appears in the ‘thermometer’ in the Google Toolbar, and which goes from 0 to 10. Instead this PageRank is the mathematical value used in the Google keyword search algorithm. It is calculated for any web page and represents the probability that a random visitor would visit the given web page as opposed to visiting other web pages.

Here we have multiplied this mathematical value by a huge multiplier to give values that are easier to talk about. We will use the term, PageRank factor, for this derived number. The resulting number would normally be a value like 5.6 or 16.2 but here we have simplified yet again to round off to whole numbers. This illustrates a typical web page (but with very few links). Some links are external links involving other web pages on other websites (domains). Some are internal links from web pages on the same website (domain). The inlinks are hyperlinks on other web pages leading to this web page. The outlinks are hyperlinks on the given web page to other web pages.

What the image illustrates is that the PageRank factor of this web page (16) is determined by the sum of the PageRank factor contributions flowing through the inlinks. This PageRank factor then flows out via the 4 outlinks with an equal PageRank factor contribution (4) on each link.

You can imagine this particular web page as being only one among the whole set of web pages on the Internet. For the technically inclined, we should mention that these PageRank values all are interdependent so they are developed by a process of iteration starting with starting values and repeatedly recalculating to determine what the values are. That goes beyond the scope of this article.

How a robots.txt file changes the picture

If a robots.txt file disallows this web page for crawl visits by the search engine spiders, then provided they obey the robots.txt file, they would record the values and links shown in this image. These PageRank values are the same, whether or not the web page is blocked to crawlers by the robots.txt file. The record is indexed because there is an external inlink that the Google robots are crawling and they would also note the outlink going to another domain. The outlinks to other web pages on the same domain (internal links) would not be recorded so these PageRank contributions are lost. In this sense the web page has become a sink or black hole for these PageRank contributions. They can no longer contribute to the PageRank of these other web pages.

Note that the PageRank factor values on the remaining links are the same as they were when the other links were being included. Merely saying the links should not be crawled, does not necessarily mean they should be assumed not to exist. This is in line with Matt Cutt’s most recent pronouncements.

How nofollow changes the calculation

Even if this web page was not excluded by a robots.txt file, a similar effect is created if all outlinks from the web page carry an attribute, rel=nofollow. Again this assumes that the search engine correctly observes this attribute. If on the other hand the links are assigned a follow attribute, then the PageRank contribution would flow through to all such links.

How to get only one web page that counts for any specific content

As Rand Fishkin suggested above, if more than one web page contains the same content, you can use a meta tag on all the secondary ones to signal noindex. Then only the primary web page is in the search database, provided the meta tags are being observed. Coupling this with a follow attribute in the meta tag, then assures that the PageRank contributions still flow out to the other web pages.

A better approach according to John Mueller, a Google representative, is to use a Rel=Canonical Tag rather than NoIndex. Here is how Google describes this canonical tag.

We now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Apparently Google treats this as a hint rather than a standard so it is not fool-proof. Others see Reasons to use rel=canonical, and reasons not to.

Best Practices

As Matt Cutts recommended, given the wooliness in some of the above, the preferred approach is to develop the website architecture so that duplicate web pages do not arise. Then one does not have to rely on the canonical tag or the noindex follow combination. In this way one avoids the hanging / dangling web pages problem.

The exact methods will depend on the architecture. One very useful approach is to show only an initial excerpt on the blog Home Page with a … more link to the full post as a single web page. For category or tag archive pages, you can show only the titles of items so this again avoids the duplicate content problem. The important thing is to be vigilant and look out for essentially duplicate web pages as revealed by a full website scan using the equivalent of a search engine robot such as Xenu.

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Hanging / Dangling Web Pages Can Be PageRank Black Holes

Avoid WordPress Duplicate Content Problems With Google

Barry Welford — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 03:10:40 +0000

The best way to ensure a web page ranks well in Google keyword searches is to make sure it is the only one on the web that includes the content on the page. In this way you avoid several web pages all having a somewhat equal possibility of being judged relevant for the particular keyword search. This increases the chance that this unique page will outrank other quite independent web pages that cover the same topic. That’s the theory and it seems to work out well in practice.

Wordpress is a great software for producing blogs but out-of-the-box the WordPress content management system produces a series of pages that all contain the same content. Just see the concerns expressed in this WebmasterWorld thread about WordPress And Google: Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues where several coding suggestions were offered to avoid the problems. More recently, David Bradley has suggested that something called the canonical link element can be the solution to Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties.

We should quickly add that this is not an inherent weakness of WordPress alone since many other CMSs will suffer from similar problems. It is a well known problem and you can find an excellent article on how to Avoid Duplicate Content on Wordpress Websites, which gives the appropriate steps to take. The most important step of all is to have the right robots.txt file.

I wondered how well people were grappling with this duplicate content problem and decided to check out some of the Technorati’s Blogger Central / top 100 blogs. In particular I thought a check of their robots.txt files would give an indication on whether they had tried to solve the problem. Here is what I found for the robots.txt files for the most popular 8 blogs.

The Huffington Post

# All robots will spider the domain
User-agent: *
Disallow:

# Disallow directory /backstage/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /backstage/

TechCrunch

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*/feed/
Disallow: /*/trackback/

Engadget

(empty)

Boing Boing

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin

Mashable!

User-agent: *
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed/
Disallow: /*/trackback/

Disallow: /adcentric
Disallow: /adinterax
Disallow: /atlas
Disallow: /doubleclick
Disallow: /eyereturn
Disallow: /eyewonder
Disallow: /klipmart
Disallow: /pointroll
Disallow: /smartadserver
Disallow: /unicast
Disallow: /viewpoint

Disallow: /LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml
Disallow: /mashableadvertising2.xml
Disallow: /rpc_relay.html

Disallow: /browser.html
Disallow: /canvas.html

User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /

Lifehacker

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index.xml$
Disallow: /excerpts.xml$
Allow: /sitemap.xml$
Disallow: /*view=rss$
Disallow: /*?view=rss$
Disallow: /*format=rss$
Disallow: /*?format=rss$
Disallow: /*?mailto=true

Ars Technica

User-agent: *
Disallow: /kurt/
Disallow: /errors/

Stuff White People Like

User-agent: IRLbot
Crawl-delay: 3600

User-agent: *
Disallow: /next/

# har har
User-agent: *
Disallow: /activate/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /signup/

User-agent: *
Disallow:

As you may notice, the most popular blogs seem to have a singular disregard for this issue with minimal robots.txt files. As you come down the list, it would seem that even these top blogs realize the importance of limiting what the search engine robots crawl and index.

The impetus for exploring this issue came after noticing an additional complication that results if you put An Elegant Face On Your WordPress Blog by using Multiple WordPress Loops.

This could have resulted in many extra web pages that humans would likely not see but search engine spiders would certainly crawl. Changes were made in the site architecture to avoid this. To avoid other potential duplicate content problems, the current robots.txt file for this blog appears as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-register.php
Disallow: /wp-login.php?action=lostpassword
Disallow: /index.php?paged
Disallow: /?m
Disallow: /test/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /?feed=comments-rss2
Disallow: /?feed=atom
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /index.php?s
Disallow: /wp-trackback
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /?feed=rss2&p

Conclusion

Getting the robots.txt file correct is one of the easiest ways of increasing the visibility of your blog pages in search engine keyword searches. Leaving two essentially similar web pages means that the two divide up the ‘relevance’ that a single web page would have. That means approaching a 50% reduction in potential keyword ranking. Perhaps the top blogs can ignore such improvements but most of us should not. Check out what the spiders may crawl by doing an evaluation of your website with Xenu Link Sleuth. We should carefully consider our robots.txt files and make sure they are doing an effective job. Is yours?

Update

Andy Beard added a comment that he has concerns about using the robots.txt file as a solution to the WordPress Duplicate Content problem. He explained these in a post some time ago called SEO Linking Gotchas Even The Pros Make. There is much food for thought there and we will follow up in a subsequent post.

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Avoid WordPress Duplicate Content Problems With Google

Arial Font No Longer

Barry Welford — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:44:32 +0000

Or perhaps that should read – Arial Font – No – Wider. Our ever sharp-eyed readers may notice a subtle change in the appearance of the SMM online properties, in other words the website and the blogs. It is perhaps a long overdue change and indeed many others may wish to adopt this change so we offer a few words of explanation. Graphic designers will find nothing new here but this is a case where a little knowledge can be helpful.

This is hardly a new topic since back in December 2001 Mark Simonson wrote an excellent article on The Scourge of Arial.

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world.

Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

He then goes on to lay out the history of how Arial evolved from a font much used in print media, Helvetica.

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, one of the most popular typefaces in the western world was Helvetica. It was developed by the Haas Foundry of Switzerland in the 1950s. Later, Haas merged with Linotype and Helvetica was heavily promoted. More weights were added and it really began to catch on.

An icon of the Swiss school of typography, Helvetica swept through the design world in the ’60s and became synonymous with modern, progressive, cosmopolitan attitudes. With its friendly, cheerful appearance and clean lines, it was universally embraced for a time by both the corporate and design worlds as a nearly perfect typeface to be used for anything and everything. “When in doubt, use Helvetica” was a common rule.

Arial is an example of a font without serifs. Serifs are those small projections that are added to letters in a font like Times Roman, which is a standard font used in MS Word. They look fine in print but do not work particularly well on a computer screen. Arial is just one example of a sans-serif font and there are now many others.

If Arial is so popular why would anyone wish to change. One reason is to stand out from the crowd. The other reason is that Arial can have a slightly cramped look and others spread out the letters a little more. This helps readability particularly with smaller letters.

Our choice is Verdana, which is now a very popular font. In consequence, the CSS style sheets now start off with the following lines of code:

body{
font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 0.9em;

}

The font-family line means that verdana is used if available. If not, then arial is used if available. If not then whatever sans-serif font is available is used. No surprises there.

The font-size: 0.9em; introduces a very important point. It could equally have been written as font-size: 90%; If a font-size is not specified, then each browser uses whatever it has designated as the default size for that font. Here are the default sizes for Arial and Verdana in Firefox and in this case Internet Explorer looks very similar.

In short, Verdana is slightly bigger. To have approximately the same height for Verdana as appears with Arial the font-size must be set at 90%. Here is how that appears:

The letters are spread out a little more, which gives improved visibility. This is more apparent at smaller character sizes. This is shown in the following comparison where both are half the size of the previous version.

The other spacing consideration is the distance between the lines and this is governed by line-height. More and more people seem to be moving to line-height set at 140% or 1.4em. The difference is illustrated in the following image:

As you will see, setting line-height at 100% reduces the default spacing which is equivalent to a line-height of 120%. That is now our standard – Verdana with a line-height of 140%. We hope you find that more legible and welcome your comments on any thoughts you may have on this subject.

Update
Just for balance, I should mention the very fine article by Sander Baumann entitled, Font Series: Arial is everywhere. It has some very fine examples of large signs in Arial that are really very striking.

Posts from the Archives

Post from: BPWrap

Arial Font No Longer

Forex Currency Trading Returns To Fundamentals

Barry Welford — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:50:44 +0000

During the global financial crisis, one might question whether currency markets followed traditional patterns. Now according to the Guardian U.S. dollar slides as other currencies strengthen.

The dollar hit its lowest level in more than four months against a basket of major currencies on Wednesday, continuing its slide as investors stuck to the view that the worst of the global financial crisis had passed. That reduced safe-haven demand for the dollar and bolstered assets perceived to have higher risk, such as emerging market currencies, including commodity-based units such as the Australian and New Zealand dollars.

This view that the Fundamentals Are Returning to Currency Trading was a widely held view:

Not only did the currencies rally versus the dollar yesterday, but gold and silver took part in the proceedings too! It’s been a long time since we’ve seen this happen. For the most part, whenever the currencies (minus yen) rallied, gold would back off, and vice versa… Not yesterday! For the first time in a long time, the negativity toward the dollar was front and center.

A return to more normal currency markets does not reduce the risk involved in currency trading. Trading foreign currencies on margin carries a high level of risk, and may not be suitable for all investors. Before investing in forex currency trading you should carefully consider your investment objectives, your level of experience, and your appetite for risk. You should not invest money that you cannot afford to lose. You should seek advice from an independent financial advisor if you are in two minds about this.

If you do want to get involved in currency trading, then you may well wish to use forex trading software, which can provide all the background knowledge you wish to have and analysis of your trading actions.

With the right forex charts, you can better analyse trading patterns and spot trends and deviations. This ongoing analysis of what is happening in the foreign exchange currency markets is essential if you are to manage the risk that is involved in currency trading.

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Forex Currency Trading Returns To Fundamentals

Multiple WordPress Loops For A New Blog Look

Barry Welford — Sun, 17 May 2009 23:04:18 +0000

The WordPress blogging software is quite rightly immensely popular. The Open-Source community that supports it has developed a whole raft of supporting code and applications that make it a pleasure to use.

This blog and the other SMM blogs now have a slightly different look. This is because we are now using a feature of WordPress, Multiple Loops. The beauty of WordPress is that the concepts are all very easy to understand. This particular feature will hopefully give much more reader satisfaction.

There are two elements to the change. The first is that you will now only see one blog post when you visit. Although Google tries to be helpful, it can occasionally provide more from a blog that you wish to see. Now you will see precisely the blog post that is relevant to your keyword query.

The other element is that at the bottom of this single blog post you will now see a list of the most popular blog posts as determined by our visitors. If you like what you see in the initial post then perhaps some of the other blog posts may tweak your interest.

The changes to the theme required for this new look are very straightforward. Hopefully this simple explanation will help you apply this same approach to your blog if you so wish.

The WordPress Loop

Web pages in a blog are produced by WordPress templates. These are files with names such as index.php or single.php. Within these template files, the heart of the WordPress software is code which is called The Loop. The WordPress Codex gives a more detailed explanation of The Loop In Action.

The content of all blog posts is held in an associated mySQL database. When a blog web page is displayed, the web page will show certain information for every blog post entry that fits the particular database query implied by your selection of web page. For example, if you want the most recent blog post, then the loop picks up only the information on that blog post. This is illustrated by the following image of a WordPress blog page.

When you visit the home page of the blog, you are often seeing a series of blog posts that are created via the file named index.php. The number of blog posts is selected by the blog webmaster. For example if it is arranged that the blog would normally show the 3 most recent blog posts, then this is illustrated by the following image.

When Google sends you to a single blog post to fit your keyword query then you are often seeing what a file named single.php produces by applying the loop. Normally in the index.php and the single.php files, the loop starts with the following code (note that a space has been inserted after < in the following code samples to ensure the code could be printed.):

< !-- start of the loop -->
  < ?php  if (have_posts()) : ?>

The Loop is then all the code before a final < ?php endif; ?> terminates the Loop (again as mentioned a space has been inserted between < and ? to allow this code to display correctly).

Multiple Loops

As mentioned the new feature is that we are now using Multiple Loops in the WordPress software. The following image shows what is being displayed. The first post is produced by a first Loop. The list of Most Popular Posts is then produced by a second Loop.

In order to have only one post appear in the first loop, we use a Template Tag, query_posts. This query_posts tag can modify what the Loop accesses from the database. In this case we wish to have only one blog post to appear so the first Loop starts off as follows:

< !-- start of first loop -->
  < ?php  query_posts('showposts=1');
      if (have_posts()) : ?>

The only complication here is that as entries are taken from database in The Loop, the database software maintains a count of the data that has been used. Normally other applications of the Loop will access only new data since past data has already been accessed. In order to see the posts which are of interest, we use another WordPress Template Tag as the second Loop starts to reset the count. This tag is the rewind_posts tag.

In order for the list of Most Popular Posts to be displayed, a new category, popular, has been created. When visitor traffic confirms that a blog post is popular, then it is assigned to this category in addition to whatever category may have been appropriate.

The code to start the second Loop to achieve the effect shown here is as follows:

< !-- start of second loop -->

< ?php  rewind_posts();
    query_posts('category_name=popular&showposts=-1');
    if (have_posts()) : ?>

Other Benefits Of This Type of Display

In addition to displaying popular posts for greater visitor satisfaction, this also ensures that such posts have more links pointing to them. This should ensure greater search engine visibility for these posts. In all, this format would seem to have only benefits. It will be interesting to see what reactions blog visitors have to this new format.

Post from: BPWrap

Multiple WordPress Loops For A New Blog Look

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